I was like you, so I eased myself into it, ie: Raw PHP -> CodeIgniter (PHP) -> CakePHP -> Ruby on Rails The reason this worked for me is that the CodeIngniter

I was like you, so I eased myself into it, ie: Raw PHP -> CodeIgniter (PHP) -> CakePHP -> Ruby on Rails The reason this worked for me is that the CodeIngniter MVC Framework is so lightweight, well documented and well written that you CAN understand what's going on behind the scenes just be reading the source code. In fact CodeIgniter is still my most used combination for web apps, CakePHP is a weapon of choice for bigger projects or when I want complex ACL and/or the kind of automatically linked MVC structure that Cake provides. I'm still relatively n00b at RoR, but I suspect that will replace Cake in my arsenal once I'm better with it. Hope this helps you.