Which certifications to take? How to start?

p-coder

Hi everyone,

I am new to IT exams and computer programming, and I would like to ask how to begin self-directed learning for the IT exams. I am aware of the certificates listed for the WGU degrees, but I am not sure which certificates to learn or how to go about studying for them on my own.

The main topics that I am interested in are machine translation and natural language processing. I was thinking about starting with Java programming and then moving onto to databases and algorithms, but I am still somewhat clueless about how the entire process works. I would appreciate any ideas on how to get started.

Vask3n

You are certainly free to use any language, but if you specifically want to learn more about natural language processing there is an Oreilly book where they teach it through Python. Python is not a bad language to use because of how ubiquitous it is and unlike Java which may or may not be installed, python is usually present on most Unix-based systems and even Windows nowadays.

Most of the code I write at work is usually either Python or Perl

https://books.google.com/books?id=KGIbfiiP1i4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=natural+language+processing&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eUyaVKT_NdKyoQSRq4KYBg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=natural%20language%20processing&f=false

p-coder

Thank you for the suggestion. I have a Linguistics background, so it looks like NLP with Python would be a good way to start.

Are there any certifications associated with Python programming?