Several months ago I had to choose among php, .net, coldfusion, asp and Ruby on Rails. I chose Ruby on Rails because I had seen the famous screencast where the author creates a blog within minutes. I even bought the Agile Web Developement book and then almost any book with Ruby or Rails in its title. To this day I am still learning without much to show off. The question is how I am going to justify so much time spent on this learning. my answer is I find this a lot more fulfilling and promising than I had bargained for.
Would I recommend it to others ?
Here is a better reply given by Michael Slater and Chris Haupt
“Ultimately, the factor that probably keeps more developers away from Rails than any other is the learning curve. If you’ve already been working with one technology, it’s always more time consuming in the short term to switch to a different one. And if you’re only working on simple sites, it may not be worth the investment.
But if you want to advance your skills and become as productive as you can be, you owe it to yourself to learn Ruby on Rails. You’ll need to invest a few months of study and practice to become proficient, but from that point forward you’ll be building better sites more quickly and having more fun doing it.
If you’re a PHP developer, you many wonder whether you can take a short-cut and use a PHP-based MVC framework instead of having to learn Ruby. In the short term, this may save you time. But Ruby is a key enabler of many aspects of Rails, and it just isn’t possible to build a framework that really matches Rails in a language such as PHP. Learning any powerful framework takes a significant effort, whether it’s a PHP framework or a Ruby framework. Learning the basics of Ruby isn’t hard. The payback is that you’ll be working in a more modern, more elegant language, and with a more powerful framework as well.
In future episodes of this podcast, we’ll explore all the key concepts that underlie Ruby on Rails. Ultimately, though, you need to begin building sites with it to really understand it. There’s a variety of good books and online resources available, many of which you’ll find listed in the show notes at learningrails.com.”
Actually this is from the transcript of the podcast . You can view the podcast here
Learning Flex and RoR simultaneously can be a hard Job for anyone especially for those who with years of designing experience but little or no programming experience.
Colin Moock has taken some pains to explain whether ActionScript is hard or not in this article titled ActionScript 3.0: Is It Hard or Not.
Well my opinion is (after reading the article and the ongoing public debate in the shape of comments and counter comments ) that end users never bother to see in which language the application is written.They just want the application to solve their problems and not force them to learn something new just to use it.
