IMHO it's more about concepts than technologies - eg, MVC based Web frameworks were a good concept to pick up a few years ago, whether you chose Rails or Django

IMHO it's more about concepts than technologies - eg, MVC based Web frameworks were a good concept to pick up a few years ago, whether you chose Rails or Django or Zend Framework etc, OOP were a good idea to pick up somewhere in the 90s whether you ended up writing games in C++ or banking apps in Java. I think one of the next concepts to take off is asynchronous (or event based) programming. It's been around for a while, but only recently (with growing interest in concurrency) becoming mainstream for non-UI, dynamic language apps. Good intro here: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Nov/23/node/ http://simonwillison.net/2009/Nov/23/node/