Section 17.3. Zend

17.3. Zend

PHP developers offer the Zend Certified Engineer (ZCE) Exam, which you can take after working with PHP for about a year. Having the certification helps you land jobs as a PHP developer, as more employers are looking for ZCEs.

 http://www.zend.com/store/education/certification/zend-php-certification.php 

Zend also has shrink-wrapped software products to help you with your programming goals. Some of their programs are described here.

Zend Studio? Professional is the premiere IDE to develop, debug, deploy, and manage PHP applications. Zend Encoder helps you with your intellectual property protection. The Zend Encoder allows an unlimited number of PHP applications to be distributed, all the while ensuring that your investment and source code are protected from copyright infringement.

The Zend Encoder compiles and converts plain-text PHP scripts into a platform-independent binary format known as a Zend Intermediate Code file. The binary files are distributed instead of the PHP code files. The user needs the free-of-cost Zend Optimizer, a runtime environment that allows end users to execute the binaries as if they were regular PHP scripts. The Optimizer provides more increased security against reverse engineering and still improves performance speed.

There is much more to Zend products, all of which you can evaluate and determine if you need them for the dynamic web site you're creating.