Decaflon

Other languages aren't really going to help you learn Ruby because its kind of its own beast. It doesn't follow "normal" syntax conventions, although it does take a bit from Perl. I'd suggest trying it for fun (Ruby is a pretty fun/powerful language once you learn it) and then moving on from there. I don't typically use RoR for most of my web apps (usually some PHP stack or possibly ASP.NET), but its a pretty cool playground. Specifically, you can do some pretty crazy data manipulation in Ruby that isn't anywhere near as simple in any other language.

However, if you're used to PHP's documentation, get ready to experience the agile generation's documentation: shitty.

Actually, knowing PHP you should get familiar with CakePHP and how it works. The framwork is similar to RoR in structure, and knowing that prior to jumping in to RoR will help tons.

I don't see the point in RoR unless you're trying to get a job and that's one of the things the employer wants. You can do everything in PHP that you can in RoR, and there's a lot of rapid development frameworks available for PHP.

Over the years I've built my own php framework that I use for everything. PHP is already running on the majority of web servers. RoR is not.

Yeah I used cakePHP a while ago, I think it's one of the best php frameworks around these days. I'm interested in RoR because everyone who uses/used it says: wow, I can write 20 rows of code in PHP and do the same in 10 rows of RoR. If I decide to learn RoR it'll be because I want to keep up with the latest technologies. Anyway, thanks for the comments. My conclusion is that I'll stick with PHP for now, mainly because the cakePHP alpha release has about two times the functionality the current stable release has.

Ozone42 :)

I don't see the point in PHP unless you're trying to get a job and that's one of the things the employer wants. You can do everything in RoR that you can in PHP..............just alot faster and better. :)

Having worked with both PHP and Ruby/RoR -- Ruby is simply cleaner, easier to understand and express yourself in, and in a totally subjective way - more fun and enjoyable than any other programming language I have had a chance to use.

PHP does have some advantages though - it takes my preference if I need a single dynamic page. Anything that begins to resemble an application is done with Rails. Unless it's Wordpress.

Also, isn't cakePHP simply a PHP port of Rails?

It's not hard. I did it and I was a PHPer. Now I won't go back to PHP even having checked out rapid dev. frameworks for PHP.. it just isn't the same.

I guess I simply like the Ruby scripting language better than PHP. Rails is just a big plus to the beautifulness of Ruby.

I'd recommend picking up a book and going through it step by step. Sure youll feel like a noob, but being a programmer you should be able to fly through that thing.

I'm on a second book, more advanced stuff and loving it.

Good luck!

@oniTony
Cake isn't a port of Rails, but its definitely inspired by it.

@magic
I'd actually agree with Ozone. There isn't currently much of a market for Rails developers outside of startups. Its something you would probably only use for hobbywork for the next year or two (or however long it takes Ruby/Rails to get decent documentation).

@baas
While its true that you can cut down your LOC significantly with Ruby, most of that is chaining and you still have effectively the same amount of code.

I don't buy the convention over configuration crap, because all that does is let developers build the same kinds of apps as everyone else simply because they're faster to setup. To-do lists, blog entries, and user accounts FTW!

I like PHP cause it lets me get work done when I need to do it. I don't need to load an entire tree structure of folders and files in order to do something, I just do it.

magic,

except the faster and better part. Yes it's faster to develop a lot of commonly used things, aside from that it performs worse unless you have a server config dedicated to it.

i've tried ruby on rails and it's awesome and easy to learn, however popular hosting companies (godaddy) did not support it at the time.

so, i tried a few of the PHP frameworks to stick with MVC programming, and CodeIgniter is by far the best documented and easiest to learn, IMHO.

www.codeigniter.com