I read the Zend Cert study guide.

August 29th, 2006, 4:14 pm Josh Houghtelin Books, PHP

I got it in the mail a couple of days ago. I was surprised to find out I didn’t have much to learn from the book. However, I did learn a couple cool details. I’m leaning to believe the PHP4 test covers the most commonly used functions in PHP while not forgetting about the php.ini file. I would assume the test leans a little harder on array capabilities as well. But drop that because I’m waiting for the PHP5 test.

Here is what I learned that might come in handy.

SHORT FORM IF-THEN-ELSE
This is just slick.
(condition ? value_if_true : value_if_false)

FUNCTIONS WITH VARIABLE PARAMETERS
It never accured to me to create a function that took variable parameters. All of these functions are self explanitory but until I saw them I never realy thought about creating functions with an unkown number of parameters..
func_num_args() // number of arguments
func_get_arg($arg_num) // pull one.
func_get_args() //get an array of the arguments.

CALLBACKS
The array_walk() function lets you iterate through an array sending each value to the function one at a time. I’m not sure I will be using it anytime soon but it sounds like it’d be helpful at some point in time or another.