Learning Something New

For a while now I’ve been wanting to get into a particular development platform and really focus on it. I’ve been a member at Dream.In.Code for nearly 6 years now and although I have learned just about everything I know when it comes to web development and programming from DIC, I still have a lot to learn to even consider calling myself a professional in any development field. I never wanted to be a “programmer” per-se; I’m not big into staring at code for hours at a time. However if I could find a language that’s very dynamic, fresh, and easy to work with and implement… I just might be able to learn it well enough to use it, professionally.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting into Adobe ColdFusion. However the problem with CF is that it’s hard to come by a host that supports it these days. My current host, (mt) MediaTemple did support CF until they launched the (gs) Grid Server platform. Another problem with a language such as CF is that it’s very proprietary. It may be easy to work with but it seems the overall support and user base behind it would be very limited. So I was looking for something that was easy to get into, easy to use, and has a solid community backing it, also it would be helpful if my current webhost supported my new platform of choice.

I’ve been looking into Rails, namely Ruby and Ajax on rails and the amazing stuff that can be easily done by them. I really think it could be precisely what I’m looking for, I mean it’s a fresh newly adopted technology and (mt) just so happens to support ROR Bins. So this week I’ve been looking around on Amazon for a couple books I could pick up to dive into Ruby on Rails, I also joined Working With Rails a ROR resource and development community I came across. I mainly did it to set up a profile for later use, you can check that out Here.

I’m actually very interested to see how much I get into this, perhaps 5 years from now I’ll look back at this post and remember the start of my path to becoming a Ruby guru? I’ll stick to the ‘Ruby on Rails for Dummies’ for the time being.

If any of you have book suggestions, ROR resources you would like to share with me, Drop me a line.