[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 ;)