Python worth teaching myself this summer ?

It's certainly worth learning. It's a very widely used language in lots of industries. Plenty of job opportunities in Ireland. Plus it's very similar to Ruby, so you'll be almost killing two birds with one stone.

Whether you need to learn it this summer or not is up you. You could get a job after college in one of the other languages you've been learning, and pick up Python in the evenings, or on the job if that's a possibility.

I'm not aware of what qualifications or certs you can get in Python, sorry.

Python is a great language to learn. There are some very nice aspects of the language.

This might not be relevant, but it is also a great language to have if you are looking for a good job. A lot of the better places to work look for Python as it is considered a more serious programming language to have for things like web application development.

The thing to remember with Python is that there is a certain way of using it (Python programmers call this Pythonic programming). A lot of new programmers from the more C based language can find themselves wondering what all the fuss is about when they just try and implement standard C style code in Python. A lot of the power of Python only comes after you learn some of the important tricks of how to programme Pythonically using it.

For example in C style languages you might to a Switch statement

switch(myVar ) 
{
    case 'A':
        myObj.doA();
    case 'B':
        myObj.doB();
 }

in python the Pythonic way to do this would be

myfunctions = ['A': myObj.doA, 'B': myObj.doB]
myfucntions[myVar]()

What you are doing here is defining a dictionary with methods as the elements and then simply calling the correct method based on what ever myVar is.

Likewise doing this in C

for (int i=0; i++; i < 10) {
   myArray[i]++
}

would be

myArray = [i++ for i in myArray]

in Python.