PHP vs Ruby on Rails

You can find loads of articles on the internet about the differences in these two with a quick google search. There is a recent post that is very helpful on which one that one should learn first. I know the Treehouse site runs on Rails so they may be biased towards it :)

I would love to see some sort of pros and cons list from a staffer though!

Thanks James. I just read the thread. Awesome read. Question, how long does it typically take to learn PHP? I know html and css but I'm looking to advance my skills and create more dynamic sites.

Is it feasible to learn enough php within a year to implement small to midsized projects?

Besides the courses offered here, what else should I be looking at to learn more.

Thanks again.

I would say that you could definitely any programming in a year. I would use myself as an example but I really don't know how long I've been doing it, lol! I started out awhile back with multiple programming languages so Idk when I started PHP.

The syntax is very similar to any c based language or java. So if you know any of those that will jumpstart your learning. If you don't know any actual programming languages(html and css don't count :P ) Then it will take some time to learn the concepts and get your "programming mind" created. In general programming languages are simple, not that many terms to know to actually program(if, foreach, do, while, +-*/%,function, class, constructor, etc) The hard part is learning how to actually apply those and make something functional.

For most projects using PHP, that would be midsized or anything would rely on some type of database system as well so you would need to learn one of those. I use mysql and it fits my need and works well with php.

Recap:TL:DR:: Languages themselves are not too hard to learn. The difficulty from programming is in the mind. Not in the syntax. Always reference the documentation because you won't know everything, probably ever.