[nobleach]

Well for newbies coming to the table, there sure are a lot of concepts they'll have to pickup. Same for PHP developers. In all of these frameworks, there is the concept of routes, data models, views/templates, controller actions, etc.

So learning one framework definitely helps out in others. The biggest hurdle for me (coming from Perl CGI then PHP to Java 10 years ago) was that I was no longer accessing a "page"... I was accessing an action in a controller. I could use views as a template and REUSE those views for other things. The "one page for each action" paradigm became dumb after that.

Most newbies can fight through the demo "blog apps" rails/django tutorials and still have no idea what they're doing. But doing them multiple times until one is comfortable with the pieces is probably more beneficial.

Lastly. Learn the actual language. I love Ruby because it's a joy to use. I hate Python. It's not a bad language I PERSONALLY don't enjoy it. So Rails was a no-brainer. I enjoy Scala, so Play Framework was a no-brainer. I (I'll admit) have fun writing Javascript, so Node.js with Express.js is fun to write.