[rortian]

The best advice I could give to someone trying to learn a computer language is to first pick something you'd like to do. You'd like to be able to put together a website so that's a good start.

With an English background you might try something like:

Putting together a collection of books by an author (or as many as you want) from Project Gutenberg. Come up with a rails site that lets you explore or search these in an interesting way.

There's lots of things to try, but trying to do something versus trying to learn something for its own sake, will give you a chance to focus and learn as opposed to just learning all there is about a language. With Ruby, there is way too much to learn, but you can get started quickly.

[acpigeon]

Excellent observation. It's exactly this sort of ready applicability that appeals to me about web tech. Thanks!