Comparing rails to just plain PHP pages - yeah, rails is VERY MUCH MORE COMPLEX. The rails 3 project is like some 2500 files and I dunno how many lines of code.

Comparing rails to just plain PHP pages - yeah, rails is VERY MUCH MORE COMPLEX. The rails 3 project is like some 2500 files and I dunno how many lines of code. There's great benefits in using a framework, most of which is consistency and no need to write the boilerplate functions. Here's a few things to think of: 1. When using a framework you can treat it like a black box, you don't actually need to know how it works, but you need to have a good enough idea of how it could work - that's why so many people roll their own framework in the beginning of their career - it's very useful to have done that. 2. Do you know Object-Orientation works? Can you program object oriented code? I did a lot of programming before I knew OO and could just not understand a single line of object oriented code (that I sometimes had to write in perl using the godawful OO syntax at that time). I just poked at that code until it worked, but I had no way of understanding the code. Took a class in OO programming at the university and it was dead easy after that. I suspect that it would be VERY HARD to grok rails without being able to code object oriented code. 3. Perseverance - for me learning new programming languages and environments always includes making the code work first and then understand. Programming is a practical thing, it either works or not works and the theoretical understanding is just a tool that's more or less useful. You'll just have to keep on working on it until it runs and then try to understand what you have done, you might not even have to understand how rails works, you just have to know enough where to put stuff and have enough experience to know what to do.