I'm wondering how important it is to know ruby/ruby on rails, I am currently learning it as it's a featured course on codeschool, do you need it and would you learn it if you were going for your first web developer job?

 

I am currently learning everything on their website except from mobile development as i don't see that as so important, what's your opinion on this, do you think I need to know this before going for my first job, I guess it's best to just learn as much as you can right?

It's kind of lost pace now with due to it not being as fast as other systems such as Node, still it's worth learning and still pretty popular, especially in the states.

 

I think learning any language though will make you a better developer, even if you dont use the language in your career, it will teach you things that can be used in other languages.

Edited October 21, 201510 yr by rbrtsmith

I really like Ruby, and Rails too. It's still popular with start-ups, because a lot of new developers are still learning it, and you can build out apps quickly.

 

It all comes down to what you want to continue with further. Rails won't help you land a job as a frontend developer, but it's suitable if you want to learn more about backend development.

 

I still know quite a bit of Ruby. I think the syntax is great for beginner programmers. It helped me understand a lot of Javascript when I moved over, like how scope works, functions, nested objects. Even though there are differences, the concepts are the same, or easy to adapt after.

 

What I will say, is that Ruby may be good for teaching programming concepts, but Rails isn't. A lot of courses throw you into what's essentially a very large framework, without much understanding of the underlying concepts. There's a lot of things that Rails sugar-coats and hides away, you can find you don't know much about the language after building something with it. This obviously isn't what you want when you're learning a language. Like most things, you need to spent a lot of time learning the language the framework is built on, not the framework itself.

I also started learning Rails a few months ago, there are many companies using Rails for web application development, I like rails because of its 'write less, do more' feature, it's kind of a RAD ( rapid application development ), you can put up a complete web app within a few weeks.