[brittohalloran]

I'm a mechanical engineer who taught myself to code and now I've written a full-blown web app. I'd recommend jumping right into Rails and building and breaking stuff, which is how I learned.

On the plus side:

-There's a TON of documentation, resources and help online.

-It's really fast to get started, so you'll get quick wins. This is key for motivation.

-It will slowly introduce MVC to you, but you don't have to build it yourself to get started.

On the minus side:

-There's a lot of 'magic' stuff going on, which can be confusing when you're used to explicit C code.

[srverma]

Heh - its funny, I was really unnerved at my last internship where I was using PHP, it felt so weird with all this abstraction because of my C background but it felt really nice being able to not worry about to details and let the magic take over as you stated.

Anyway, when you say Rails, are you talking about RoR, or just plain old Rails (is there a difference)? The stuff you learn from rails, did it teach you good software engineering or mostly implementing a specific type of web app?

Thanks for the advice though. Giving this stuff a try now!

[brittohalloran]

Yeah Ruby on Rails (same thing).

After building something for a couple months I feel like I have a decent grasp on MVC, which is the biggest win. I also have a lot better grasp on all the moving parts of a web app (website) -- how requests are routed, how it interfaces with the database etc...

[dolphenstein]

Check out web2py as well. It started life as an aid for teaching web development, so it's geared towards getting you to focus on the important bits (and not on configuration/boilerplate code).

[fsniper]

There is Ruby the language, Ruby on Rails the framework or simply RoR or Rails for the lazy ;)