Well, I’ve done it…I’ve finally folded to peer pressure and decided to learn the Ruby programming language and…Rails too…I suppose.

I’ve railed (no pun intended) against it for a few years now simply because I’m absolutely positive that it’s just a fad.

Every time I’ve taken a look – I’ve decided that there’s no earthly reason for me to bother learning it. I can’t find a single legitimate reason to use Ruby…except that its the hottest language at the moment that commands the highest salaries.

It seems to me that I can do everything Ruby does with PHP and MySQL, and possibly a little javascript here and there…much quicker and easier than by deploying some massive Rails project. But whatever. I’m a little under the weather and taking a break for a day or two, so I’ve got nothing else to do…

How I’m Learning Ruby:

There’s tons of ways to learn any programming language. Usually I just read some tutorials online and then start banging around and building things till I get the hang of it. But this time I decided to enroll in the new codecademy.com Ruby class.

It’s totally online, interactive, and “go at your own pace” which is nice because I can blow through it quickly.

I’ve played around with codecademy’s stuff before and found it to be a little too simplistic and too easy for my taste. But frankly, I don’t want to put a lot of effort into this so codecademy seems like the way to go.

There’s also a coursera ruby class that I hear is good, but that seems like more effort that I’m willing to put into this.

I just started an hour or so ago and I’m already 70% done with the class. So far I haven’t discovered any reason to use Ruby, but it’s admittedly early days. (EDIT: a couple hours later I finished the entire course)

We’ll see how it goes.

What about you? Have you recently learned Ruby? Have you found it to be worth knowing or more of a fad? I’d love to hear your comments…