It exists and it is called PerlMonks, although instead of a certificate the site issues 'XP points' (they are a sort of game really, but don't tell anyone you are trying to impress) and 'node rep'.

Maybe we don't push the Tutorials section here enough, but there is a lot of good material there for newbies and not so newbies too. And in addition to tutorial material we have a huge number of online tutors just waiting for your questions (we call them 'monks' for some reason).

Talk a walk through the halls of the monastery and you'll find all sorts of interesting rooms, some of them better hidden than others.

If you want to create the perlpassion website as a business venture, and actually put in the time and effort to create a credible learning site, then good luck and I wish you much success. However if this is just a volunteer effort to fill a perceived void, consider that there are hundreds of half baked free Perl tutorial sites out there. A person would receive a much better education from a few good Perl books.

The idea of a Perl "newbie" forum seems to pop up occasionally. While it may sound like a good idea, not many experienced programmers are likely to hang out on a site oriented to newbies, so you would end up without much expertise.

The advantage of Perlmonks is that regardless of where a person is on the learning curve, it gives everyone an opportunity to learn, receive help and contribute by helping others. Look at the number and variety of people here. There are thousands of perlmonks. Everyone from beginners to the original creator of Perl itself can be found on this site. Every group is represented - newbies, seasoned programmers, engineers, system administrators, module authors, hobbyists, researchers, students, instructors. Almost anything you need to know about Perl can be found here.

Hmmm, I think that collecting certificates is not the proper way to learn a language, neither a natural language nor a computer language. Collecting experience by using the language is way superior to collecting nicely printed pieces of paper.

Until yesterday, I've never heard of javapassion.com, maybe because I don't use Java that much, maybe because it's simply not that important. I don't know. Now, I had some free minutes to look at the page. From the front page, I have the impression that this is a one man show, not much of a community, and following some links didn't change that impression. The announcement stating that the content will cost money in the near future doesn't make a better impression.

If you want to support Perl, there are better ways:

• The core documentation is partly translated to non-english languages. I know of a german translation, and a few other languages. But many parts of the documentation are not yet translated. Other parts base on very old versions, new parts still have to be translated.
• Most of those translations happen completely outside of the perl development. Integrating a multi-language documentation into the perl source tree should provide you with work for years.
• The available core documentation is huge, several documents are overlapping, and several documents haven't been touched for years. Cleaning up that would be a great help.
• You could pick a project and contribute useful howtos, cookboks, tutorials, whatever kind of documentation could be useful for the users of the project. Even if you don't get them included into the projects source tree, you could still post them here, in the Tutorials section.
• Learn Perl and try to help HERE. No one expects you to be an expert for Perl's often strange internals within a week, and we rarely need such expertise here. Lots of the questions asked here are really easy to answer. Sometimes, all you need to know is where the answer is already given.

You considered yourself being a newbie. I don't think that this is the best qualification for someone willing to teach on a given subject. Or is your plan just to provide a platform that the "real" Perl gurus are expected to fill with content, lessons and the like? Let me assume you would really get them to work for you for free. Who will take care of administrating the platform? You as a newbie? I don't think that even that would be a good idea. Newbies often run into traps that make their work vulnerable. I don't think we need yet another platform written in Perl that is vulnerable to trivial attacks.

Alexander