Comment by saiko-chriskun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saiko-chriskun | Hacker News Reader

Mobile development (in my experience) is generally a bit harder to get into that just standard web development. You could try something like PhoneGap or just plain web-friendly mobile development first to see if that works out well enough, but if you go native you'll have to fully learn Java / Objective-C (for the android and iphone, respectively.)

As for web development languages / frameworks that are beginner-friendly and well supported, I don't think there's much competition to Rails. However node.js has definitely been gaining momentum recently (would allow the entire app to be coded in javascript :P) and if you go that route definitely check out coffeescript (or even clojurescript, which is what I'm interested in, but that's more of a leap :P).

Personally I'm going to use my next personal side project to learn http://chicagoboss.org :P

I'm a front end guy trying to learn mobile, and my experience has been that iPhone programming has a steep learning curve. I bought every book on the market, and memberships to sites like Peepcode and Think Vitamin, and still barely feel competent.

I think what helped me most was paying for development, and then scouring over the code to see what I could learn, while playing with features and Interface builder until I was able to make progress.

As I said, I'm still far from productive, but it at least makes sense.

I once toyed with the idea of building a place for freelance dev's with extra time on their hands could fill their hour gaps by teaching people to code, but that's still on the back burner for now.

Thank you. I will definitely check out PhoneGap, but if it's just a cute substitute for learning Java/Objective-C, I figure I might be better served by learning the latter.

What is the practical difference between Rails and node.js? Is one harder or more transferrable than the other? Is one better for certain kinds of web development than the other?

I'm basically interested, I guess, in compiling the greatest base of practical, current knowledge in the next few months. I figure after that I can pick up more obscure knowledge as I go.

The main practical difference would be that the rails ecosystem is just much larger in general (i.e. more community support, ready-made plugins, documentation, what have you.)

As for certain types of web development node.js is definitely more suited for apps that do a lot of real-time stuff (like chat.)

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