While there were a few perspectives that some might not have noticed or thought about. For the most part, this was pretty light weight compared to the practice exams. If you have been working in the language and keeping up with the world, you should have at least seen most of this before. I would not rely on it for more than a detailed outline of some of what you need to know cold - - - at least for the practice exams. Perhaps I will be surprised by the actual exam, and find that this is exactly what is needed - - - who knows.

One can easily argue that the certification exam itself is a waste of money, but with this book and its associated practice exams, the case is a little more cut-and-dry.

Want to pass the exam? Know the following things:

1. What can and can't go in a function/variable name.

2. What typehints are, how they work, and where they're applied.

3. What all of the array_*() functions do. The more verbose array_*_*() functions which nobody uses can be safely skipped over.

4. How to use the SimpleXML library in a very general way i.e. access elements, attributes and convert to DOM.

5. Everything about the new object model, including abstract and final classes, the new constructor format, destructors, autoloaders and access specifiers (public, private, protected).

6. How and when to pass by reference.

7. When things go out of scope.

8. What the following php.ini directives do: allow_url_fopen, register_globals, enable_dl, disable_functions.

9. What goes in the superglobals and when ($_SERVER, $_GET, $_POST, $_REQUEST, $_ARGV).

10. What all of the bitwise operators do (you should also be able to convert numbers to and from decimal, octal, hexadecimal and binary notation with nothing but your brain and a piece of scratch paper).

Database topics are covered, but you generally don't have to know any of the nonsense about mysqli or PDO--these things are all too buggy to actually use anyway, so learning about them is doubly pointless. If you can memorize function argument lists, do so with the preg_ and various string functions, because they like to throw some curveballs that use the optional args no one ever thinks about. If you can't, then don't bother because you can usually eliminate at least two of the choices they give you right off the bat and guess your way through the rest.

And please, please, please, leave comments on the questions that have misspelled words. They really need to fix that if they're going to charge $125 for a test.

I took the test and passed :) (I think that says it all ;-) )

I studied the book along with the PHP help in order to digg a little more on the functions. I also bought the online practice test to see which areas I needed to focus on.

I liked the book, easy to understand/read.

This books covers a good amount of the topics on the certification, and I would definitely recommend it for the certification and general PHP knowledge. You will probably need more than this to pass the certification. I would recommend taking the online practice tests from the Zend certification site as well.

This book provides many perspectives on PHP5 certification. However, as a certification preparing guide, I don't think it is good one to pass the exam just by reading this book.

First, it does not have questions at the end of each chapter to evaluate how well the reader learned from the material, as many other exam preparing guides do. It is hard for me to imagine how does the real exam go without those questions.

Second, it has many errors in this book. Some of them could mis-lead you to get wrong concepts of PHP. I agree with Brian, the previous reviewer, beware of using this book. Once you felt anything confused, check out other books or write some codes to test what is the right concept you should learn.

Finally, it does not mention any information about how to connect / retrieve / update information from / to databases with a PHP script. It does have a chapter called "Database Programming", but all it has are only the introduction of SQL statements. I doubt if we don't need to prepare that part for PHP certification.

However, it provides some chapters for XML, web services, and security, which are valuable to refer to. It brought my attention to find more resources to read for those parts.

If you prefer a book that mentions key points of exam without many details, this book is the one you should read; otherwise, pick another one will be a better idea for you.