Is it better to be well rounded, or an expert in one field?

Blaize;

Those are great questions! I think the best answer is going to be it depends on what you are trying to do and, to a certain extent, where you are ultimately trying to work.

For example, if your desire is to strictly focus on back-end development and don't really care about the User Interface (UI), then having a very basic knowledge of HTML and CSS (to be able to talk to front-end developers) then concentrating on PHP/MySQL would suffice. Employment wise I think you would be looking for a medium to large type of company that can afford to have a staff of both front and back-end developers. Conversely, if your goal is to freelance or work in a small development firm, the more well rounded you can be the better.

In terms of learning lots of PHP and Ruby and Python, if you are just starting out I would recommend becoming proficient in one of them by taking the courses here, building some of your own projects, learning more elsewhere, etc. prior to attempting to become an expert in another one. Once you get proficient in one language it is much easier to expand into another. I have found that trying to learn too many at once slows the learning process, but that could just be me.

I would also recommend working through Treehouse's Careers Foundations Course as it covers a lot of this type of information and very well could help decide which topics you should be concentrating on in your studies.

Best of luck,

Ken

I think with technology it's often the case of choosing the right tool for the right job. PHP can't replace CSS for instance. So PHP, JavaScript, & CSS are all needed to make a web application.

It's not necessary to try and learn PHP and Ruby concurrently that's probably counterproductive.