Work verus Self Tought Programming Experience

When I interview someone and they have lots buzzwords, I tend to ask them to tie the buzzword to a job listed on the resume. Many times half the items where in school or they read a book.

School is fine for a kid with a couple of years of experience. But if you are working for more than a couple of years, pull it off your resume.

Today, "read a book" is still not good. But there are advantages to book learn'n. When solving a problem at work, you learn what you need to learn to complete the task. When reading the book, you get to learn about the full breadth of a topic. But that does not mean to put it on the resume.

But, with the web and web services, people can prove what they learned from the book to prove competence. Creating a blog or a wiki, or posting more correct answers than questions on forums. Also with services live AWS, you can implement a service if it is applicable. Maybe create a project on sourceforge. This allows you to prove your book learn'n with real code people can examine.

I have some scripts I wrote a few years ago that had some real cool Perl tricks in them. I am going to show my Perl experience by writing a series of short tutorials, posted here, to show how well I know perl. Or how well I think I know perl :D

I am hoping to do that with Ruby. Write some scripts and post them, or participate in some forums.