1: About Ruby & Rails

Ruby is a programming language. Some people who know about these sorts of things seem to think it is nice. It is a high level programming language which from a practical point of view means it can do a lot of smart things. It is also an interpreted language (like php) which means that it is parsed in real time. This makes it slower than languages such as C. However as computer speed is constantly improving most code is not speed critical and the time you save in development and testing easily justifies using higher level languages. These facts are not particularly important. As far as learning ruby for the purpose of rails goes, at first at least, you'll pick up most of the syntax as you go along. For a neat introduction to ruby (allows you to try it out in your browser) see here. This is not really necessary to get going with rails though. Rails is a web framework. Basically rails allows you to use the ruby language to create websites. It will create the framework for your application automatically including basic forms, view pages etc. It integrates with a database in a natural way and also has facilities to maintain the database, distribute your application on different servers, manage updates and different versions and testing capabilities. Tis good. Anyhow all you need to know is that it will make your life much easier. There are lots of 'discussions' on various bulletin boards between rails fans and rails haters about how rails is/isn't flawed etc. Rails is an 'opinionated' system and prides itself on not trying to be everything to everyone. It emphasises convention over configuration. This means it likes you to do things in certain ways (and maybe restricts you from doing some things), which seems to annoy some people (!). However, these ways seem to be well thought out and on the whole lead to easily maintainable applications which are easily understood by other rails programmers. Which seems a good trade-off to me. If you are worrying about this I probably wouldn't bother.