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Comment by symfoniq | Hacker News Reader

I've done both PHP and Ruby/Rails professionally. They are quite different. I earned a living with PHP first, but I prefer to use Rails (or Sinatra) for most projects these days.

Even though PHP and Ruby (and therefore Rails) have little in common, I think you can still learn the Rails fundamentals quickly. Check out Michael Hartl's excellent Rails Tutorial. Also, Ryan Bates' Railscasts are a fantastic resource.

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Thanks symfoniq. I started with PHP also, and picked it up fairly quickly. I'd learned Ruby regardless, just to work with this dev team and it never hurts to know another language. I really wanted to hear experience from someone who went from php to ruby (since that's what I'd be doing).

Php .net is so well doc'd with an example for almost every function/feature that it made it EXTREMELY easy to pick up. Does Ruby have something similar (really hope it's not -> ruby-lang.org, reminds me of w3), not too keen to Michael Hartl's just cause I'd have to buy it.

it is ruby-doc. What don't you like about it specifically? Its very concise, consistent, and thorough, which is what I always thought was ideal for these.

Michael Hartl's book is free to read online...

I much prefer Ruby's documentation to PHP's. Especially when it comes to 3rd party code, I don't have one gem in my current Rails project that isn't very nicely documented. Compare that to the PHP I work on during the day and almost all the 3rd party libs have no documentation.

Perhaps I am misinterpreting your statement, but it almost sounds like you blame PHP for the lack of documentation of those libraries. Really you should be blaming the authors of the libraries for poorly documenting them, or the developer who chose those libraries, for choosing ones with poor documentation.

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