back-end web developing

When evaluating job skills I like to check indeed.com and look at the number of positions for a skill.

According to indeed, as of today, php has 20k postings and rails has 16k postings.

I would look up jobs that sound like places you want to work, money you would like to make, that are making apps you'd like to work on. Also look at online apps and sites you really like and see what they are developed with. If the only end point of learning one or the other that you see is to create stuff that you don't want anything to do with (why I never bothered to learn a language like Fortran), then it will be worthless. But when you are excited about learning one or the other then there you go. Then head in that direction.

For me, I focus on php. If you look at my Treehouse profile you will see that ruby is zero. lol. I've never had a need to learn Ruby (on Rails or otherwise). Everything that I wanted to do I can do with php and now I'm in the middle of interviews for a job that would be a dream and it revolves around....php :) .

**note I'm not suggesting that you should never learn both or at least be familiar with the other. I'm just to old and don't have time to go through the Ruby courses knowing I'm not going to do anything with it when I'm done.

thanks so much, that's been helpful and insightful. I'll assess my options. but another thing, is there basic variation between the two, some functinality that I can do with one but not the other? or everything is doable on both (like database management, user-account, user-authentication and so on)

well, I'm already learning about javascript so that would be a handy idea when developing some personal projects/web apps. thanks for the tip.