Harid Web Id

The following outline, taken from the Official PHP Certification Study Guide, summarizes the Certification exam's objectives:

The Basics of PHP

• Introducing PHP

• PHP and HTML

• PHP and XML

• PHP and databases

• Creating a PHP page

• Using PHP tags

• Language basics

• Constants and variables

• Identifiers

• Operators

• Conditional structures

• Iteration and loops

• Functions

• Variable functions

• Including files

PHP and the Web

• Creating HTML content using PHP

• Client side and server side embedding PHP in HTML

• Creating forms

• GET and POST: accessing form variables

• Cookies

• The superarrays: accessing global information

• Session management

Arrays

• Variable collections: introducing arrays

• Numerically indexed and associative arrays

• Multidimensional arrays

• Sorting

• Reordering

• Serializing arrays

• Manipulating arrays

Strings & Regular Expressions

• Formatting strings

• Comparing strings

• Modifying string contents

• Regular expressions

• Extract in data from strings

• Joining and splitting strings

Debugging & Performance Management

• Common programming mistakes

• Programming logic

• Creating good code

• Avoiding bugs

• Avoiding performance pitfalls

• Troubleshooting performance bottlenecks

File Manipulation

• Opening a file

• Writing to a file

• Reading from a file

• Closing a file

• File locking

Managing Date and Time

• Dates in PHP

• Getting the current date

• Converting a string into a date

• More date functions

• Date calculations

• Dates and databases

• Using the calendar functions

• The UNIX epoch and the dangers of UNIX dates

Object-oriented PHP

• The basics of object oriented programming

• Classes

• Instantiation and constructors

• Attributes

• Accessing objects, methods and attributes

• Implementing inheritance

PHP and Databases

• When to use a database

• Types of databases supported by PHP

• Inserting data

• Extracting data

• Joining data

Security

• Trusted and untrusted input

• Managing authentication

• Escaping data for database and shell programming

• Validating input

• Preventing XSS attacks

Managing E-mail

• Sending e-mail

• Managing the headers

• Formatting an e-mail message

• Attaching a file to a message

Stream & Network Programming

• Using file wrappers

• Connecting to a remote host using sockets

• Blocking and non-blocking calls

• Creating and using streams