W3Schools PHP Certificate

[LevelUP]

As a personal challenge and to brush up on my skills, I took the W3schools PHP exam and passed in one day.

I ended up failing the course on my 1st attempt because I ran out of time and my laptop was going slow. For the last 20 questions, I had to read fast and guess on most of them.

I'll share some of my tips that should help you all out. 

If you know how to program in some other language, and are familiar with SQL, it's a walk in the park.

I can confirm a lot of the basics are true with any programming language.  For someone brand new to programming it may take the full 20 hours to complete the course.  It's not hard by any means though.

BJ, it's only the PHP course or you have to take also SQL course?

You don't buy the course, it's free, you are only buying the exam.

The course includes a part of MySQL where it interacts with PHP.  You don't need to do the complete MYSQL course. 

The Course is Free Here:

https://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

The "Prerequisites: Basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript" is BS.  All you have to know is that "<br>" means a new line in HTML, that's it.  I never saw any CSS/Javascript and no exam questions had any HTML questions. (correction: I did see one H2 tag so technically that CSS, whoopty doo).

Steps to Complete the Course:
1. Study PHP Tutorial, PHP Forms, PHP Advanced, PHP OOP, and MySQL Database.  Use the online PHP editor and play around with the code by changing or adding your own stuff.

2. Do the PHP Exercises

3. Do the PHP Quiz, redo until you score 90%+

4. Study and take exam.

For Ajax all you have to know is that is for dynamic web pages that can be updated without reloading the whole page.  Don't worry about PHP reference stuff, or XML.

The exam is 70 questions in 70 minutes.  You need to score 75% to pass which is 53/70.

On my 2nd attempt, I passed with a B.