Rails VS PHP

How timely! I was coming to the forum to ask this very same question. The abundance of Ruby and Rails content found here on Treehouse and over at CodeSchool would indicate that it's where these educators believe the future of the web lies. But when looking at what employers are looking for in job listings, I only ever see PHP. I'm also curious how they differ and what advice you could give to a newbie who wants to get started. The short answer is probably to learn both, but if I'm interested in finding a gig soon would I be better served learning PHP over Rails?

Why You Should Learn PHP

It's the most popular language for web development outside of perhaps Java and most of the major CMSs are programmed with it. Getting your PHP app to run is mostly a no-brainer, you just give Apache a PHP handler or you simply enable modPHP. Junk shared hosting even supports it. If you're looking to work right now, you'll want to learn PHP.

There's been a lot of support thrown behind Laravel, which attempts to hide a lot of the PHP syntactical cruft behind a Rails-like framework. It's a very high quality framework and although I've not used it for a serious project yet, I could definitely see myself doing so quite soon. I don't think it's a stretch to say it's the closest thing to a Rails equivalent in PHP.

Why You Should Learn Ruby

Even if you don't program in Ruby on the backend, you'll be using a ton of tools in the Ruby ecosystem, I promise. Ruby is a wonderful language that's very terse and expressive. You'll notice when you start reading Ruby code it tends to be easy to read. That's for many reasons but partially because Ruby has expressive keywords. Instead of saying like in most languages that if not equal to x you say unless x. This seems like a small thing but it really adds up in terms of clarity. You tend to be able to almost think in Ruby once you get good at it. You're not fighting with syntax like you are in PHP and Java.

Why Beginners Should Probably Not Try to Use Rails

I strongly disagree with beginners trying to use Rails because there's too much magic involved. Ruby is a very complex language with a ridiculous amount of capability. Rails is exponentially so.

You might learn how to crank out an app but you're not going to understand much about programming. Most of Rails is in fact not programming. There's nothing programming about has_many :categories, you don't really understand what's going on at all. You're basically a glorified Visual Basic code jockey and you don't want that. Be a programmer.

The Rails ecosystem is incredibly powerful and has so much you need to learn apart from Ruby to really get the strongest benefits out of it. In order to really blow up on Rails 4, you need to understand Ruby, Sprockets, Sass, CoffeeScript... All of these things are optional but if you're not utilizing them you're leaving so much power on the table that IMO it's not worth using Rails.

I'm NOT Saying Beginners Should Not Learn Ruby

While much easier to find a PHP job, especially an entry level one, Ruby is great. If you like it, and you like the tools learn it. I actually recommend you learn both eventually. What I'm saying is try vanilla Ruby and see how far you get. Learn about Rack or a simpler framework like Sinatra. Once you're comfortable there, you can revisit Rails with a much better foundation and understanding of what the magical parts are actually doing so you can understand if you're doing it correctly.

This is a favorite topic here on the forums, in fact there's a whole tag just for php vs ruby on rails

Including a very popular answer from Randy Hoyt