To be or not to be a Zend Certified Engineer?

When Zend released their certification in 2004 I promptly picked up their study guide in October 2004 (along with MySQL’s study guide). However, even now I’m still not certified, I’ve studied the material but never booked the exam. When I stumbled across this thread it reminded why I never booked the exam.

An interesting quote from Chris Shiflett (PHP security guru and member of the Zend Advisory Board) about the study guide:

However, I feel obligated to voice my concerns about the book. It was very rushed (we each had a couple of weeks to write our chapters), and the production time was nearly cut in half. As a result, the book has more errors than the average technical book. In addition, the practice questions in the back are ones that were thrown out of the real exam. This means that they were considered to be too hard, too tricky, or too useless (like memorizing the order of arguments passed to a function).

This put me off certification. I’ve lent this study guide to other developers at work, and they estimate to only pass 60% of these test questions. The problem with these questions is they’re assessing your ability to memorise the manual, not good programming practice.