ruby certification

[Austin Ziegler]

I tend to agree, to some extent at least. I'm surprised, though, that
you didn't address the matter of how a CS degree is characterized here.

Mostly because I avoid talking about CS degrees in general. :|

Computer Science degrees are not supposed to indicate a basic ability to
program -- computer science as a field is something else entirely. It is
as though everyone expects a CS degree to be the definitive programming
certification. Of course, because that's how it is treated in the job
market, schools have started chasing that in how they structure their CS
degree programs, with the end result that they end up being about as
worthless as vendor-driven certifications. Oh, sure, they make you
*look* good, but they don't make you *actually* good, at least judging by
the results I've seen.

Damn straight, and that's completely wrong. That *said*, a computer
science degree should present both theory and practice together in a
way that *does* prepare you for the workforce. The student I had for
this year's Summer of Code was really good: knew his theory, knew his
programming. He'd never had a code review even in the co-op positions,
and that's a lot of what I did for him this summer. A computer science
degree should expose you to a lot of different programming languages
because they affect the way that you think about problems.

It seems most CS degree programs are just (really long, really expensive)
Java certification courses, these days.

Not just these days. There are a few schools that I actually care
about the CS program from. Otherwise, I see a CS degree as a checkbox:
willing to complete things to other peoples' standards. I have very
particular ideas about what a good liberal arts education should be,
and I think most university and college degrees should be good liberal
arts educations. Too many CS departments spend too much time worrying
about vendor specific details and not enough worrying about theory and
practice. Some CS departments spend too much time worrying about
theory and almost nothing about practice. You *must* have both. And
almost *no* CS department spends any time worrying about interpersonal
communication and writing skills. Those skills will far outlast almost
any other skill you will learn in all of CS. Programming languages
come and go (anyone really use REXX these days, great language that it
was?); ways of *thinking* and *organizing* and *communicating* will
last.

Spot-on, I think, with the exception that it's not reputation that makes
the mentor -- though certain types of reputation are strong indicators.

Well, it's the mentor that makes the reputation, obviously. However,
that reputation precedes or often has to stand in for the mentor.

It's important to separate the certification from the instruction. A
certification is only as useful to the person pursuing it as it is useful
for getting a job -- and it is only useful to employers who know better
than to care about a certification (in that they have a competitive
advantage over those employers who take a certification as some kind of
magical indicator of ability). Certifications are also, oddly enough,
useful to instructors in that it provides them with a built-in marketing
tool: if they advertise their programs as certification training
programs, they're more likely to get students clamoring at their doors,
assuming the certs in question are in any demand.

Oh, you're absolutely right. It's a vicious circle, mostly because of
the people (employers and employees) who demand certification. I think
that I've got a couple of "certs" for completing some RUP University
classes (ha!). Needless to say, I don't report on the certs on my
resume ever. I have said that I've got experience and training in RUP.

Sadly, degrees are much the same -- but there's probably less than one
hundredth of one percent of employers out there that realize this. I
learned a lot in college -- but mostly in two specific ways:

1. pursuing knowledge on my own time

2. sticking with a good instructor for future classes, even if they're
outside my chosen degree program

The end result is that I didn't learn all that much from the classes I
needed for the degrees I pursued, even when I was getting As on
everything. Learning is something you do, not something you receive.

The primary goal of school=97at any level=97should be to provide you with
the tools you need to acquire more knowledge on your own. Most of that
will be through constructive criticism (although many people fail at
the constructive part). Teachers can't teach you anything; they can
only give you the opportunities you need to learn. By example, they
also help you learn the tools you need to learn more and hopefully get
a passion for learning. Maybe even a passion for one or more topics.

-austin
--=20
Austin Ziegler * (e-mail address removed) * http://www.halostatue.ca/
* (e-mail address removed) * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/
* (e-mail address removed)

 

[Austin Ziegler]

Mark Woodward wrote:
Well in this area at least it is possible to improve yourself, as a Perl
programmer do you have any modules on CPAN that sound useful and are
being used or that you are contributing to. Same goes for all the other
languages. I got a job as a web developer after submitting my Perl code
for genetic algorithms (which incidentally *still* hasn't made it onto
CPAN).

Spot on.

And I understand that Greg and Michael are more than welcome to have
helpers on PDF::Writer

-austin

 

[Gregory Seidman]

]

I tend to agree, to some extent at least. I'm surprised, though, that
you didn't address the matter of how a CS degree is characterized here.
Computer Science degrees are not supposed to indicate a basic ability to
program -- computer science as a field is something else entirely. It is
as though everyone expects a CS degree to be the definitive programming
certification. Of course, because that's how it is treated in the job
market, schools have started chasing that in how they structure their CS
degree programs, with the end result that they end up being about as
worthless as vendor-driven certifications. Oh, sure, they make you
*look* good, but they don't make you *actually* good, at least judging by
the results I've seen.

It seems most CS degree programs are just (really long, really expensive)
Java certification courses, these days. [...]
Sadly, degrees are much the same -- but there's probably less than one
hundredth of one percent of employers out there that realize this. I
learned a lot in college -- but mostly in two specific ways:

1. pursuing knowledge on my own time

2. sticking with a good instructor for future classes, even if they're
outside my chosen degree program

The end result is that I didn't learn all that much from the classes I
needed for the degrees I pursued, even when I was getting As on
everything. Learning is something you do, not something you receive.

A CS degree does not say a whole lot, other than an ability to at least
tolerate an undergraduate education. A CS degree from a school with a known
reputation says a lot more.

An ideal CS program does not teach programming beyond the first year. It
requires programming, but it teaches problem solving within the context of
software (and maybe hardware) development. One should come out of a CS
program familiar with a body of knowledge involving numerous problem
solving approaches, including languages, algorithms, data structures,
architectures, approximations, strategies, design patterns/idioms, etc.,
and their tradeoffs. One should also have the ability to analyze the
relative suitability of various solutions (from an algorithmic analysis
perspective as well as time/memory/power/accuracy tradeoffs). Recognizing
problems as those one already knows how to solve (or can be proven
intractable) is pretty important, too.

Programming is a means to an end here. It is the practice of the various
skills listed above. It is also part of the learning experience. (Sure, you
can learn the theory of preemptive multitasking and concurrent processes,
but you understand it a lot better if you've implemented a semaphore in
assembly.) I learned to program well before college, and used (and
improved) that programming skill throughout college, but I didn't get
really good until I had to TA a software engineering course in grad school.
In college I managed to implement a preemptive multitasking OS on top of
DOS, a web-based DB-backed app (in 1994, before we had these nice
frameworks, in C, which sucked), an ATM (not the bank kind) networking
simulator, a version of Eliza (in ML), a raytracer (in C++), a parser (with
lex/yacc, though I can't remember the details now), and others I can't
bring to mind at the moment, as part of my coursework. Those projects
weren't about programming, they were about problem solving.

I'm not going to claim my undergrad education was perfect (for example, I
shamefully avoided the compilers course), but it did teach me how to solve
problems with software. That's what I do professionally, whether it's in
Ruby or some other language (as it has been and as it will be). I'll grant
you that a CS *degree* is no guarantee of a CS *education*, though. (Also,
for those of you who did not get a CS degree, the lack of a degree is no
guarantee of a lack of a CS education, either.)

CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]

--Greg

 

[Ryan Davis]

Interviewer: "What can you tell me about the OSI?"
Interviewer: "What's OOP"
Interviewer: "What languages have you used?"
(See a trend yet ;-))
Interviewer: "What Operating systems are you familar with?"

Uni teaches a lot of theory, but unless you're working in the industry
that's all it is.. theory! I'm actually working in IT now but I
wasn't for the first 8 years of the degree.

I've been trying to avoid this thread but this one pissed me off...

Education at any and all levels is what you make of it. The trend I
saw across all of your examples is that you wasted your time and
didn't learn very much. I worked my butt off and left proficient in
imperative programming (pascal, modula-2 C), object oriented
programming (esp smalltalk but also C++), formal language theory so I
could build my own languages, build tools like make, and a lot more.
That was what I was interested in and that is what I pushed myself on.

We had another group lecture us on OSI so I know they left school
proficient on the networking side. Indeed, two of them went on to work
for speakeasy, another went to amazon and worked on the network
security team.

OSI wasn't my bag so I listened to the lecture and moved on. If you
leave college with a CS degree and you aren't hire-able, it is
nobody's fault but your own.

This is just as true for certificate programs as it is for undergrad,
high school, whatever. You get out of it what you make of it.

 

[markonlinux]

Hi Ryan,

I've been trying to avoid this thread but this one pissed me off...

That obviously wasn't the intention.

Education at any and all levels is what you make of it.

If you reread my post I pretty much said the same thing:

"One thing I will say about the whole Cert/Uni thing though is it
depends on the person. Like somebody else said, you could sleep
through a course, barely pass the exam, and forget it the next day.
Or you could use it as a springboard to go further."

The trend I saw across all of your examples is that you wasted your
time and didn't learn very much.

I'm looking (hopefully) at a distinction average, so I must have
learnt
something.
The trend I saw in my examples is that I learnt a little about many
different topics, but wouldn't say I'm 'proficient' in any of them.
Now maybe I learnt more, and I'm more 'proficient' than I give
myself
credit for. Hence the:

"I do though find myself thinking "oh, that's what the lecturer
was trying to get across" at times."

I worked my butt off and left proficient in
imperative programming (pascal, modula-2 C), object oriented
programming (esp smalltalk but also C++), formal language theory so I
could build my own languages, build tools like make, and a lot more.
That was what I was interested in and that is what I pushed myself on.

If you leave college with a CS degree and you aren't hire-able, it is
nobody's fault but your own.

Probably! I was hire-able *before* I left Uni based on academic
record.
Again, my intention wasn't to dismiss the degree as irrelevent. It
certainly *was* relevent.

If I had to sum up what I was trying to say above, it would be that
Uni
provided a broad base, but now I need/want to target specific areas
of
interest to a level where *I'd* consider myself proficient!


cheers,

 

[Chad Perrin]

Education at any and all levels is what you make of it. The trend I
saw across all of your examples is that you wasted your time and
didn't learn very much.

That's a gross generalization -- such a sweeping generalization that it
entirely leaves the realm of accuracy. At least three people here
(including me) made the point that while it seems most instructors don't
really teach anything effectively, and don't much teach what the
certificate or degree program promises, individual effort can more than
make up for the deficiencies of the classes.

That was what I was interested in and that is what I pushed myself on.

. . which just reinforces the point about individual effort.

 

[dare ruby]

Hi everybody,

I need some details about just online exams. I will prepare by my own
but i need some certification exam which is accepted by most of the
software exams globally. just like SCJP, Red hat etc. Just prepare by
your own and write exams online.

Is there any free exams for ruby online just like brainbenceh
certification?

 

[Giles Bowkett]

Well in this area at least it is possible to improve yourself, as a Perl

Spot on.

And I understand that Greg and Michael are more than welcome to have
helpers on PDF::Writer

Plus one. I think it's a lot easier to find work with successful open
source code than a degree. There's a kind of ceiling to what you can
achieve without studying computer science, but you can study computer
science on Wikipedia and beat that ceiling for free.

I wouldn't knock cramming for exams, though. I got XML certified and
didn't need to use XPath until a year after the exam. I wrote up a
pseudocode sketch because I didn't think I remembered the syntax
exactly, but I *did* remember it exactly - my pseudocode ran
perfectly, first time, no bugs. I figured I was going to sketch it,
then turn it into something which worked, but it worked as written.
The cert itself was a pretty silly waste of money, but the experience
was very valuable. If you work hard to remember something, you'll
remember it. Certifications are useless for someone like me but the
*process* of getting one was very valuable. I guarantee you, if the
Pragmatic Studio gave an Idiomatic Ruby cert, it would be worth
getting, whether you ever put it on your resume or not.

--
Giles Bowkett

Podcast: http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com
Blog: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
Portfolio: http://www.gilesgoatboy.org
Tumblelog: http://giles.tumblr.com

 

[Gregory Seidman]

Plus one. I think it's a lot easier to find work with successful open
source code than a degree. There's a kind of ceiling to what you can
achieve without studying computer science, but you can study computer
science on Wikipedia and beat that ceiling for free.

There's a lot of information on Wikipedia, but information isn't knowledge.
Presentation of information in a curriculum is more than just the body of
information, and (going back to an education being what you make of it) you
can't go to Wikipedia's office hours and ask it a question. At least part
of the reason for paying for an undergraduate education is the face to face
time with experts in their fields.

I wouldn't knock cramming for exams, though. I got XML certified and
didn't need to use XPath until a year after the exam. I wrote up a
pseudocode sketch because I didn't think I remembered the syntax
exactly, but I *did* remember it exactly - my pseudocode ran
perfectly, first time, no bugs. I figured I was going to sketch it,
then turn it into something which worked, but it worked as written.
The cert itself was a pretty silly waste of money, but the experience
was very valuable. If you work hard to remember something, you'll
remember it. Certifications are useless for someone like me but the
*process* of getting one was very valuable. I guarantee you, if the
Pragmatic Studio gave an Idiomatic Ruby cert, it would be worth
getting, whether you ever put it on your resume or not.

...which all reinforces the idea that training can be valuable, even if the
piece of paper and resume line item is useless or worse.

Giles Bowkett

--Greg