From: Dave Aronson Date: 2012-12-27T12:14:13+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:28 PM, Sean Westfall wrote: > How well respected is this certification in the industry: Ruby > Association Certified Ruby Programmer. Generally speaking, Rubyists don't regard certifications very highly at all. We tend to prefer experience, and participation in the community, especially open source contributions (so we can see your code and use it). > Is it worth the time? As opposed to just sitting around, sure. As opposed to studying (as *though* you were going to take a certification, perhaps?), actually *doing* something, and participating in the community, answering questions as you can and asking questions as you need? Not IMHO. My advice would be to work your way through a Ruby tutorial or two, then a Rails tutorial or two, then pick a project you want to implement, that you don't mind the world seeing the code for, and Just Do It, for the practice. Put the code up on Github, so we can see the code, the commit messages, how you went about it (including whether you had tests and how you refactored), etc. Feel free to ask us about anything you get stuck on... and while you're here, help out the next batch of newbies. Also, don't make the mistake of thinking that your prior experience in other languages is worthless. That's the kind of nonsense that recruiters, HR job-description-writers, and other such tech-clueless people believe. That's how we wind up with "requirements" of N years of experience in technologies that have been around for about N/2 years. Every hour you've spent in Java, C, Perl, even BASIC, gives you valuable software development experience, much of which . All the more so when coming to Ruby, which is still a relative rarity. Discounting that is like saying that a master Toyota mechanic must accept an entry-level position in order to work on Hondas. (And no I'm not just saying that because I have about 25 years of C and only 3 of Ruby.) Lastly, there are other things you can do to start and enhance your career in any given field, such as perfecting your LinkedIn profile, and blogging, but those are beyond the scope of this forum. Plus I've blathered on quite long enough.... :-) -Dave -- Dave Aronson, the T. Rex of Codosaurus LLC, secret-cleared freelance software developer taking contracts in or near NoVa or remote. See information at http://www.Codosaur.us/.