Living in Berlin, the city of cities, has alot of advantages. One of the main advantages is that a lot of smart nice people realize the beauty of Berlin and therefore also live here. Some are even so smart as to live within a mile from my home. This applies to Stefan Hinz for example, who is the co-author of the anxiously awaited "MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide".
So instead of having to wait endlessly until Amazon finally stocks this book, I just had to put on my sandals and take a little stroll over to Stefan to have a nice chat and to pick up a copy of the book!
As I have mentioned I have decided to spend a year on self education. Getting MySQL certified is one of my top priorities for this year. Also I have had MySQL 5 installed on windows and linux for quite sometime now, but I never really got up and played with all the new features. This book looks to be the perfect excuse to finally do so!
I am also hoping that through one of the 3 the universities in Berlin I might be able to take other certification exams at reduced prices. I know alot of the hard core people will now shake their head. I am well aware of the fact that being certified does not automatically mean I am better than a non certified person. But that is not the point of a certification. Its main goal is to make it a bit easier for people to weed out the duds and increase the chances that the people they are hiring actually know what they claim to know about.
For example I am sure that 98% of all PHP programmers know less about Oracle than 99,999% of those people that have gotten Oracle certified. So what does that tell us? Not alot of PHP programmers know Oracle well and more importantly someone hireing a PHP programmer to work on an Oracle project will probably sensibly move people that are Oracle certified up the list. By the way .. I feel similar about my university degree, its just a paper to get and waive around.
I have found there is a noticeable difference between programmers that have been to university to learn the principles of coding and those that haven’t. Not that I think coding is anything special but particularly when it comes to OOP it sure does help.
Get all the education you can I say!
Berlin sounds cool. I want to move there. Be keeping an eye on this space for what its like.
