On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:28 PM, Sean W. [email protected]
wrote:
How well respected is this certification in the industry: Ruby
Association Certified Ruby P.mer.
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