Is the Comptia A+ Certificate Worth Doing For A Programmer?

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Hello,

I am currently on my 2nd year of university studying Software Engineering. I was wondering if i apply for the comptia A+ certificate, can it be of a benefit for my future IT career path especially in the programming field as a software engineer, or rather the certificate will be of just plain knowledge for myself?

Can the comptia A+ or even the N+ or the S+ be of any beneficial for a programmer? And has any programmer who you may know or even you, who ever attempted to do a degree in software engineering and the comptia A+ ?

Can the Software Eng. degree and the Comptia A+ certificate complements each other?

Thanks for reading and helping me out with your answers,
J

 

Thanks for the reply wagnerk

 

No A+ certification is not necessary, knowing your hardware can be helpful for a lot of reasons however depending on what type of programs you are writing.

 

To respond to the title of your post directly, I think it's always worth having additional knowledge however it may not necessarily improve your programming skills... my reason for saying this is based on that I have the A+ and am already working as an IT Technician, on the side I enjoy programming but I do not feel that the A+ benefits any area of my programming as they are different areas of expertise.

 

Knowing about memory hierachies and caches, cache lines, pages helps write efficient code.
Knowing about sizes of pointers and address buses helps.
Knowing roughly how long operations take, like register access, cache miss, main memory access, CPU to GPU transfer, disk access, network access etc, helps.
The general architecture of a PC helps. Knowing which devices can work asynchronously, like NICs, GPU, CPU etc. The type of buses between devices and to a lesser degree the physical distances also has a bearing.
Knowing about latencies, seek times, cache hits versus misses helps. Knowing about cache contention helps.
Knowing about your OS at a fairly low level helps.
Knowing about things like MTU's can help if designing network protocols.
If writing device drivers, file systems, network protocols or a lot of other system software or middle-ware then knowing system architecture can be useful.

 

sorry dmarsh, you are right... the areas I write code for is with web developments rather than standalone applications... I am going to be getting in to App Development at some point in the near future so will be looking at compatibility within the development then but not sure if the A+ can assist with development directly to answer the originating thread question.