Although most of the attention this week has been on the release of PHP 5, Zend has also just announced the Zend PHP Certification.

I am happy to be a member of the Zend PHP Education Advisory Board, the group that "has established the curriculum criteria necessary to demonstrate expertise in PHP." In addition to authoring some of the examination questions, I also now know what a psychometrician is. I think I even spelled it correctly.

I am a coauthor of the Zend PHP Certification Study Guide, which will be available within a week or two. If you want a guide that teaches you everything you need to know to pass the examination, this is the book for you. I think this is a particularly good book, because it covers a wide range of topics, and because each topic is explained by an author chosen for his expertise in that particular topic. There are also practice questions at the end of each chapter to help you determine whether you have sufficiently learned the material.

Opinions about certifications are mixed, but no one can deny that this is another step forward for PHP. Add in the release of PHP 5 and the recent news that PHP is one of the five most popular programming languages, and I'd say this has been a very good week for the PHP community.