are there any websites that have excerises to test your php competancy
php competancy
w00t 20 out of 20!
20 / 20 !!!
(sounding geeky) I aM UberCOOL, WROX MY SOX
Not that that test demonstrates "PHP competency", just some basic syntax and very basic theory. I mean, how does knowing what "PHP" stands for indicate as to whether or not a PHP coder can create a valid, efficient, and robust PHP application? :rolleyes:
NogDog wrote:Not that that test demonstrates "PHP competency", just some basic syntax and very basic theory. I mean, how does knowing what "PHP" stands for indicate as to whether or not a PHP coder can create a valid, efficient, and robust PHP application? :rolleyes:
Coding ability is linked to the esoteric. Very hard to actually examine as with all esoteric things people end up arguing when eventually it reaches gut feeling and starts sparking off code smell reflexes. For a topic where there are so many ways to do the same thing the questions really need to be essay based and marked as such.
eg.
When you get a new project what approach do you take and why?
What would you change on previous projects if you could redo them over?
What are the weak points of PHP, how do you avoid them?( knowing what is weak in the language you use allows the guarding against it )
I was interviewing lately and one of the job specs sent to me was "knowing the reason to use array_key_exists instead of isset". To me that is a warning sign that the minutae could give too much gratification over bigger things. The answers to the questions I stated says far more about a developer than their ability to remember 100 random functions and the order of their parameters. Though those sort of questions have to be dealt with on some form of personal level as the examiner/examining board may have to be forced to rethink their approach and mark correct what they may of thought is invalid in all circumstances( nobody is perfect 
).
Also testing on minutae is cheap as I can look for 100 things I have done and people are unlikely to knowto make me look good to my manager in an interview process.
I find the esoteric/soft science side of development far more interesting as well. One day we will build robots with large AI and the esoteric will allow this. Whether there will ever be killer ninja ones or not will prove very interesting.
bradgrafelman wrote:I just did some quick Google searches and came up with:
I've just taken the first of these two tests, and I didn't do quite as well as the rest of you ... IMHO, the only thing that test measures is one's ability to identify a piece of code as having been written in php.