Those are definitely reasonable concerns! PHP has been more dominant in the Web world for a longer period of time, that much is definitely certain, and there's

Those are definitely reasonable concerns! PHP has been more dominant in the Web world for a longer period of time, that much is definitely certain, and there's a lot of resources out there already. I think this Google Trends chart captures my impression of the relationship between the two languages, though: http://www.google.com/trends?q=php%2C+ruby&ctab=0&geo=us&date=all&sort=0 http://www.google.com/trends?q=php%2C+ruby&ctab=0&ge... In addition, although you're definitely right in that there must be much more PHP documentation out there, you're not going to have much difficulty Googling for Ruby errors either - just because there will be fewer results doesn't at all mean that there won't be any. Just like in any other programming language mainstream enough to be considered a good language to learn on, any problem you have in that language will have already been experienced by someone else, and there'll almost definitely be an easily found Google result that'll solve that problem. If you're really on a quest to create web apps and you'd like to invest in knowledge that'll help you and your webapps grow, I'd really strongly recommend learning Ruby (or Python) over PHP. edit: on closer examination of that Google Trends chart, it looks like a good chunk of the Ruby results are from non-programming-related hits, but I'd still be willing to bet that the overall trend is the same.