

Pros and Cons of Ruby/Rails and Nodejs/Angular/Express for a beginner in 2014? - soapboxsam

A fairly simple question to ask but probably pretty complex to answer. I have limited web development experience (HTML, CSS, a bit of JS) and I&#x27;m looking to broaden my horizons by learning both Ruby&#x2F;Rails and Node&#x2F;etc...<p>My question is, which one should I concentrate on first and why? I realize that Rails is a framework while NodeJS is a platform (with Express being the framework) but I see a lot of people saying that Rails can do anything Node can do and vice versa. So, why should I learn one first over the other? Is it a waste of time to learn both?
Related, in learning either Rails or Node what other tech should I concentrate on? Coffeescript? SASS? Bootstrap? Other suggestions?
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BWStearns
RoR Pros: Ruby is easy to learn, Rails is opinionated which makes learning a
little easier and gets you used to the MVC concept (not sure if Express is
similarly so). Ruby and Rails are pretty mature, so there are gems (libraries)
for just about anything you can think of.

RoR Cons: You still need to properly learn JS because it's the web. Node is
now the "cool" thing, so there seems to be a lot more attention on it as of
late.

On other things: make sure to learn SQL on it's own. ORMs are awesome but
sometimes it's easier to write a custom query. It will also make debugging DB
stuff a lot easier since the error messages (at least in Rails) usually
contain the query where it went wrong.

Haven't used Node yet so I feel unable to contribute anything on that other
than that it's the same language on front and backend, so that might be
easier.

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playing_colours
Language choice between JS and Ruby doesn't really matter a lot. Focus on
general concepts (Http, Request/Response, Routing, Templates, model, Db,
caching, organising, optimising your code, deployment, tuning). I would advise
to start with some microframework (Express.js, Flask, Sinatra, whatever) to
see how things really work. In Rails there's a lot of magic and you will learn
Rails specific stuff instread of ungerlying techs.

