[jfaucett]

I'd say the stack to learn depends on what you want. Basically, the best bet for a job anywhere is knowing LAMP plus frontend (which you already can). I think rails/ruby is prolly going to be harder but if thats what you like then go for it :) As far as apache goes if you just want a job as a developer basically all you need to know is mod_rewrite aka regex, and some really basic other stuff like virtualhosts, etc that you can learn in a day. On the other hand SQL is going to be harder, learning "enough" shouldn't be a problem, but to know how to use joins,views,triggers,migrations , etc is something you should start on in tandem with your programming language. I know too many developers who don't concentrate enough on knowing/managing their data when this is always the heart of your application. As far as hosting goes, with LAMP you all you need is a nix machine somewhere, I'd suggest getting a linode (http://www.linode.com/). This also has the added bonus of great docs and you can try out and teach yourself everything on your own machine w/out crappy cpanel stuff.

Good luck!!

[BenWhit]

Thanks! That's good to know about Apache. I haven't even had a chance to look into it thoroughly. Maybe I'll dive into it this weekend :) So if I want to get up and running quickly my best bet would be to grab a linode with a LAMP stack?

[jfaucett]

yep :) I'd suggest getting your linode with the distro you want, then going through one of these tutorials http://library.linode.com/lamp-guides. Also have a look at all the other docs on library.linode.com there really good and you can learn a lot.

Lastly, if you happen to decide to learn PHP instead of Ruby, I'd highly recommend starting out "the right way" with a framework like Symfony2 (http://symfony.com/) or Flow3 (http://flow.typo3.org/) that uses namespaces, good OOP techniques, ORM, and encourages / will teach good programming techniques. Also, have a look at composer (http://getcomposer.org/) - which is the modern PHP equivalent of Ruby Gems.