here are the three that within in a month you should be able to write some sweet apps quickly. 1. Head First Rails I first poohed this book but I had read 7-8

here are the three that within in a month you should be able to write some sweet apps quickly. 1. Head First Rails I first poohed this book but I had read 7-8 other books adn still was confused so I thought what the hell. I did each project several times and started making changes. Totally awesome especially the ajax integration parts. This is when I could actually make my own simple apps in less than a week. 2. I loved Agile Programming book - totally awesome. Not enough apps though. Great explanations. Gentle exposure to Ruby. 3. beginning novice to professional for ruby. I love this book. It is just plain fun. Good examples. I totally had fun with this. Peter is totally totally awesome - I wish he would write every tech book!! Now you have the grounding, start making and asking questions. What killed me was the UX/UI stuff. Then a friend suggested CSS Mastery book and using blueprint this got me clued in. Now I was not paralyzed. It was so awesome to see an app created in literally minutes. I loved RoR - I miss it terribly. I disliked the community. Fanboyish. It was like being in all male high school with everyone thumping their chests and no help. I still miss it very much. Whenever I code I first think in RoR then do it in php. My background was coldfusion, c#asp.net, java, etc. I need something dumb simple and php does the trick. And the people are nice and there are tons and tons of example to do anything. Also I needed something that is simple to deploy and maintain. Yeah yeah -RoR is easy to deploy - my first deployment took me several hours. Whereas php was minutes. In terms of sys admin and performance and optimization, I rather deal with php. As DBA, I do not really want an ORM. BTW when you feel good with RoR - check out Enterprise Rails - wow - good stuff on performance and optimization.