Top Programming Certifications for IT Pros

Some familiar and not so familiar essential certification options for developers.

Anthropologists reckon that humans around the globe speak somewhere between six and seven thousand distinct languages, with a number around 6,700 appearing most frequently in online sources. Nobody has conducted an exhaustive survey of all of the computer programming languages in use around the world, but other more focused studies are available.

These include the US Department of Defense “Survey of Computing Languages” (aka DoD Language Survey) conducted in 1995, which identified no fewer than 450 such languages in use in various weapons and automated information systems in the 1970s with 37 recited as part of the 1995 survey. At any rate, some number from hundreds to thousands of such languages appears both reasonable and defensible, depending on the types of systems and applications under consideration.

These days, computer programming certifications are as much about development platforms and environments as they are about specific programming languages. That’s why you’ll find an interesting mix of language-focused or –specific credentials available (such as the Sun/Oracle Java and the Zend PHP certs) as well as various platform-oriented credentials like those from Microsoft (which stress Visual Studio, .NET, and other platform technologies along with programming languages such as Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual F#, Visual Basic, and Jscript) and Adobe (which stress its many content creation and development tools such as DreamWeaver, Flash, PhotoShop, and so forth, along with ColdFusion, ASP, JSP, JavaScript, and other interactive Web- and application-based toolsets).

How’s a responsible IT professional supposed to get his or her arms around all this stuff nowadays? Some well-known certifications can help, so we provide pointers to our Top 5 in text and table form in the sections that follow. Some of them will be quite familiar, but there may be some surprises in our line-up, too. Read on, and see!

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems. See here for all of Ed's Tom's IT Pro articles.