Heh - its funny, I was really unnerved at my last internship where I was using PHP, it felt so weird with all this abstraction because of my C background but it felt really nice being able to not worry about to details and let the magic take over as you stated.

Anyway, when you say Rails, are you talking about RoR, or just plain old Rails (is there a difference)? The stuff you learn from rails, did it teach you good software engineering or mostly implementing a specific type of web app?

Thanks for the advice though. Giving this stuff a try now!