Programming certs

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi all,

I currently hold a HND although I did this around 9 years ago now, had modules on Delphi, Pascal etc. and done an XFree project in C (great fun). Done very well (Distinction overall) in the programming modules.
I didnt do a coding job after as I was still recovering from an accident that had made me even more intraverted and needed to impove social skills or would of just locked myself away!
Been in support since (Windows/Linux/350 node lan support), and not sure where to go now but definately want to leave my current job (Fed up of lack of recognition, off end users, clueless managment etc..). Ive also done the CCNA in between.

Never done the degree but thinking about that part time, but that is going to take a good while and need to switch jobs. I could do with learning algorithms, more maths, about the design process etc. (Not just pseudo code on paper etc.) which I would of done on the degree.

Are there any good certs to do that I could cover this and maybe get a junior coding role after this and go from there?

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Not seen any good certs that cover Maths. I'm doing MST121/MS221 with the OU at the moment for Maths.

For algorithms I reccomend reading anything by Robert Sedgewick.

For design maybe read Gamma Et al. Design Patterns book.

Maybe also read UML Distilled book. Anything by Martin Fowler is usually good also, maybe Analysis Patterns/Patterns Ent Arch books etc.

MCSD and MCPD tracks each have one design exam. Covers N-Tier architecture etc. These tracks are really for people already in the industry with 2+ years experience.

Degree beats certs every time for a coding job in my mind, experience coding and solving numerous different problems in different technologies and domains trumps everything.

 

Thanks for the reply so far

I need to have a good look at the open uni stuff, I know I get credits for the HND and CCNA and see what I need from there.

Then I can pick all the stuff I need to work on and have interest in, maybe even in an order that is beneficial to picking up a junior coding job

 

The OU do a top up from HND to full Bsc (Hons) it is 4 modules (2 compulsory, 2 optional) I think it is worth having a look at.

Martin Fowler Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is very good but a little heavy if you are rusty. The OU top up above includes an option Java Software engineering module which is a good one to do. Although it will assume a reasonable standard so maybe either get some Java Books (Head First Java is quite good) or take the Level 2 Java course first.

Other stuff you can do is just get some books and start having a go. Doing it is the best way of learning it. I wouldn't bother with the certs as it will look strange if you have no experience but then have certs which are supposed to denote experience if you know what I mean. People doing that tends to devalue thier worth.

 

Finished MST121, averaging 90% so far, not worried about assignments but the MS221 exam has me very worried, 17 years since my last proper maths exam

Ahh the old Guru Meditation fault, those were the days, when your OS had intuition...

 

Those were the days when I spent all my cash on 3.5" discs PD / Demos an always wanted a HD but couldnt afford it then

Do miss those Demos (the tunes and the effects they got out of the amiga)

I try to upload that animated gif from google as my picture on here but board wouldnt let me.

Have you seen this http://www.chiptune.com/ all done in javascript from what I can see, awesome it will blow your mind

Had a D in gcse maths I think, the teacher was horrible and I wasnt interested then (around 16/17 yrs ago). Done more maths on the HND, mainly algebra and related but always wanted to know how to work out certain things ie. Some of the stuff they do in games like flightsims, and the physics etc. Think I could code a platform ok at the moment I would really like to do some proper Maths.

 

Thanks for the link, im not going to type in Amiga demos into youtube I will be on there all night!

 

LordMollyBap makes a good point, I was assuming you already know basic Object Orientated techniques and design. If not it would be good to pick this up first along with an OO language.

I guess Delphi is Object Orientated right, so you should be good on the basics.

Te Head First series of books is also a good series.

 

The HND topup idea sounds what I would be looking for. I am looking into this.

What I know about OO is probably basic, never done the more advanced stuff.

thx again for advice

What is on them that you didnt do at school, would it have all the cool stuff to help do maths for games and the like?

 

MST121 and MS221 include algebra, calculus (differentiation and integration), matrices, basic statistics, geometric and arithmetric sequences, binomial therom, some trigonometry, number theory, complex numbers.

See here :-
http://herbert.gandraxa.com/herbert/ouc_mst121.asp
http://herbert.gandraxa.com/herbert/ouc_ms221.asp

The algebra, geometry, trigonometry and matrices are very relevant to how computers handle 3D. The course is however a general maths course.

Maths areas not covered by OU on my courses :-
Quanterions
Splines/Surfaces

Obviously these non maths specific areas are also not covered:-
Programming/Algorithms/Graphics/Scene Graphs/Textures/Data structures/Lighting/IEEE Floating point/GPUs and many others...

I've got quite a few maths, physics and computer graphics books

The OpenGL superbible is quite a good OpenGL primer.

I've recently bought this, not read it yet.
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Game-Developers-Development/dp/159200038X

This is not a bad general primer on computer graphics theory.
http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Graphics-C-Version-2nd/dp/0135309247

Theres a lot of specialist games programming books out there, have a look around. The GPU Gems series is supposed to be good.

There are also games physics books around.

It depends if you want to learn a library, specific teqniques, the general theory or you just want to write games now.

Do you want to learn OpenGL or DirectX ? etc

The latest games use state of the art rendering engines and scene graphs which take several man years to develop, you can buy commercial ones or get hold of open source ones.

Microsoft also have their XNA suite.

It would help if you know C# or C++ if you want to write games. Most commercial games are largely C++, XNA supports C#.

Then there are other subjects like custom shaders, CUDA and OpenCL etc.

 

Hopefully I can integrate this sort of stuff into a degree topup as I have always wondered about what I never done. I think id be right in saying a lot of this stuff would be useful in certain coding situations, and not knowing lots/most of it can only limit how id go about solving a problem (like maths is modelling everything!).

I have seen some of the OS stuff (which is great considering its free), makes you apprecate the latest UnrealT engine (etc.) knowing years went into it, must be cutting edge stuff.

Think I could do some 2d cubes (years since I done a Windows manager type thing is turbo pascal)

Syallbus looks interesting (if not foreign in most respects to me)


MST121 and MS221 - Did you overlap these?

I was looking at these a while back by Donald Knuth -
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0201485419/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=