New to Rails / Dont know PHP. Advice?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hello all, FlannelBeard here. I’ve got a project coming up for work that I think can use rails. I want to impress my boss. It does require a database and it will need to process credit card information. I am a front-end web developer. I can tweak BASIC php, nothing major. I know how to edit Jquery and a little Javascript. I do know Html5 and Css, though. Php and other back-end languages prove…difficult for me.

My question, is that for a guy with my skill set, is it recommended to learn Ruby on Rails where I am at, or do I NEED, again, NEED to know Php in order to better grasp Rails?

I wouldn’t say you need to know php to understand rails. It might even teach you bad habits, depending on what sort of php you do. Of course in general learning your first language/web framework will be more difficult than the second, so if you really got your head round rails then you might find php easier than if you dived straight into php, but then it’s probably true the other way around too.

Fred

2

That goes on the assumption that Rails or Ruby itself doesn’t teach you some bad habits if you learn Ruby by way of Rails. Or that Ruby can’t teach you bad habits when it can. Abuse of Modules and Classes (directly related by over using modules instead of classes or the other way around and such,) abuse of meta-programming, abuse of certain types of loops that are considered slow. You can abuse any language but it’s much easier to abuse Ruby and think you’re doing it right because it works good right now… more than some other languages if you ask me.

I’ve always said and will always repeat: It’s easy to learn any programming language, the hard part is learning to do it right. This goes doubly for Ruby if you ask me because the resources available are huge, the hard part is sorting which are actually good resources and won’t end up leading you down a path that will end up hurting you one day.