WRITING AN EXAM IS never an easy task. Socrates is quoted as saying that “an unexamined life is not worth living,” but (although he wasn’t really referring to taking technical tests) we’re sure that most people sitting in an examination room would gladly exchange places with the legendary philosopher and drink his hemlock rather than take a test. Luckily, writing an exam doesn’t have to be such a traumatic experience. Given enough preparation and experience, you should be able to successfully pass it without much in the way of problems. The Zend exam itself is designed with two goals in mind: first, to test your knowledge of PHP and, second, to do so with as much of a practical approach as possible.

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Pro PHP XML and Web Services is the authoritative guide to using the XML features of PHP 5 and PHP 6. No other book covers XML and Web Services in PHP as deeply as this title. The first four chapters introduce the core concepts of XML required for proficiency, and will bring you up to speed on the terminology and key concepts you need to proceed with the rest of the book. Next, the book explores utilizing XML and Web Services with PHP5. Topics include DOM, SimpleXML, SAX, xmlReader, XSLT, RDF, RSS, WDDX, XML-RPC, REST, SOAP, and UDDI.

Author Robert Richards, a major contributor to the PHP XML codebase, is a leading expert in the PHP community. In this book, Richards covers all topics in depth, blending theory with practical examples. Youll find case studies for the most popular web services like Amazon, Google, eBay, and Yahoo. The book also covers XML capabilities, demonstrated through informative examples, in the PEAR libraries.

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An understandable and insightful how-to manual for implementing SOA.

Service-Oriented Architecture Modeling provides answers to the most common questions that enterprise executives, managers, architects, business analysts, and developers face concerning service-oriented development lifecycle initiatives. The topics discussed elaborate on major organizational software modeling challenges and offer strategic and tactical solutions to enterpise concerns. This guide for service-oriented projects covers such topics as service-oriented modeling language, service development lifecycle, service conceptualization, service discovery and analysis, business architecture, service-oriented business integration, service design, and service architecture.
Michael Bell (Monroe, NJ) is the founder of Methodologies Corporation, a service-oriented architecture modeling firm.

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This is a good rehash of the Gang of Four patterns, reworked in C# 3.0. The book's fairly concise and most patterns are clearly laid out with a simplistic example to demonstrate the basics of the patterns followed by a more detailed example in a semi-real world implementation. The articles are nicely done, there are a good set of exercises about each pattern, and there are some good comparisons between similar patterns. As an example, there's a bit comparing the Builder and Abstract Factory which details that a Builder is concerned with how things are built while an Abstract Factory is concerned with what is built.

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Pro PayPal E-Commerce contains the most comprehensive collection of information on the latest PayPal technologies available. It takes the approach of PayPal as a digital money platform, and shows how its a dynamic service that offers far more than just payment processing.

With its breadth of technologies and APIs, the PayPal platform is a basis for development and innovation for an unlimited number of possibilities. It offers a wide range of payment technologies, but its not always easy to decipher which technology is the best choice for a web site. This book gets under the hood to show you how the different technologies work, how to choose the right solution, and how to implement the solutioncomplete with real-world PayPal success stories.

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Create, post, and promote your own videos on the world's most popular online service! How to Do Everything with YouTube explains how to shoot and edit videos, insert titles and captions, add special effects, and upload content. You'll learn how to set up a YouTube channel and integrate YouTube videos into your websites and blogs. You'll also discover the success secrets behind YouTube celebrities and breakout videos. Share your unique video creations with millions of viewers with help from this easy-to-follow guide. (more…)

Delivering rich, Web 2.0-style experiences has never been easier. This book gives you a complete hands-on introduction to Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, the new framework that offers many of the same benefits for Ajax development that ASP.NET provides for server-side development. With Programming ASP.NET AJAX, you'll learn how to create professional, dynamic web pages with Ajax in no time.

Loaded with code and examples that demonstrate key aspects of the framework, this book is ideal not only for ASP.NET developers who want to take their applications a step further with Ajax, but for any web developers interested in ASP.NET AJAX, no matter what technology they use currently. That includes JavaScript programmers who would like to avoid the headaches of writing cross-browser code.

Programming ASP.NET AJAX offers you:

• A high-level overview of the ASP.NET AJAX framework
• Functional code that you can cut and paste for use in your own applications
• The essentials of JavaScript and Ajax to help you understand individual technologies used by the framework
• An organization that reflects the framework's packages, including Extensions, Control Toolkit, the Futures CTP, and the AJAX Library
• Sidebars throughout the book that identify and propose solutions to potential security breaches
• Ways to use the standards-based AJAX Library with other platforms, such as PHP
• A complete chapter on the UpdatePanel control for making individual parts of a web page independently updateable — one of the framework's most important elements

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While building on the skills you already have, Expert SQL Server 2005 Development will help you become an even better developer by focusing on best practices and demonstrating how to design high–performance, maintainable database applications.

This book starts by reintroducing the database as a integral part of the software development ecosystem. You’ll learn how to think about SQL Server development as you would any other software development. For example, there's no reason you can’t architect and test database routines just as you would architect and test application code. And nothing should stop you from implementing the types of exception handling and security rules that are considered so important in other tiers, even if they are usually ignored in the database.

You’ll learn how to apply development methodologies like these to produce high–quality encryption and SQLCLR solutions. Furthermore, you’ll discover how to exploit a variety of tools that SQL Server offers in order to properly use dynamic SQL and to improve concurrency in your applications. Finally, you’ll become well versed in implementing spatial and temporal database designs, as well as approaching graph and hierarchy problems.

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If you think you're well versed in ASP.NET, think again. This exceptional guide gives you a master class in site building with this framework. You learn how to develop rock-solid web portal applications similar to My Yahoo!, iGoogle, and Pageflakes using ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Workflow Foundation, LINQ, and .NET 3.5, along with ASP.NET 3.5 — sites that can withstand millions of hits every day while surviving scalability and security pressures. 

If you think you're well versed in ASP.NET, think again. This exceptional guide gives you a master class in site building with ASP.NET 3.5 and other cutting-edge Microsoft technologies. You learn how to develop rock-solid web portal applications that can withstand millions of hits every day while surviving scalability and security pressures — not just for mass-consumer homepages, but also for dashboards that deliver powerful content aggregation for enterprises.

Written by Omar AL Zabir, co-founder and CTO of Pageflakes, Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 demonstrates how to develop portals similar to My Yahoo!, iGoogle, and Pageflakes using ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Workflow Foundation, LINQ and .NET 3.5. Through the course of the book, AL Zabir builds an open source Ajax-enabled portal prototype (available online at www.dropthings.com), and walks you though the design and architectural challenges, advanced Ajax concepts, performance optimization techniques, and server-side scalability problems involved.

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Dive deep into the internals of query tuning and optimization in SQL Server 2005 with this comprehensive reference. Understanding the internals of SQL Server helps database developers and administrators to better create, access, and effectively process information from enterprise data. Written by experts on SQL Server, this volume from the Inside Microsoft SQL Server series of books focuses on query tuning and optimization. You'll take an in-depth look at the best ways to make queries more efficient and effective, while maximizing existing resources. Includes extensive code samples and table examples to help database developers and administrators understand the intricacies and help promote mastery of query tuning and optimization.

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