I personally went from PHP > RUBY > Ruby(cgi) > Sinatra > Rails, And i think the journey was great because sometimes we need to learn and work in really bad tec

I personally went from PHP > RUBY > Ruby(cgi) > Sinatra > Rails, And i think the journey was great because sometimes we need to learn and work in really bad technologies to appreciate something as good as rails. We should strive to make the learning curve more enjoyable rather than making it beginner friendly, The only way i know of doing that is to show evolution of technologies, there merits and de-merits and why or how we have reached where we have reached and why we took the technological decisions that we took. How we reached to rails from PHP or cgi. How treacherous the journey was. Rails just has too much magic and higher level of abstraction built in that it easier for beginners, But when you want to do something really great you need to look under the hood. That is RUBY, Rack and HTTP. Because sooner or later you will realize that a web app is nothing more than HTML/CSS/Javascript so you know the nuts and bolts of the underlying infrastructure the better. I think learning something as basic as sinatra is much better than learning rails , so that you have some idea of the underlying stuff and then when you move to rails you can learn more of rails by just looking at its code. Personally i learnt a great deal from looking at rails source than looking at a tutorial. But surely it would be a daunting task for a noob. Also learning Rack comes naturally with sinatra. and as you look at Rack, sooner or later you would figure out how to write a cgi adapter for your rack app. Then Comes rails which saves you from all the mundane task you were doing developing in sinatra and much more. This way you would have a better understanding and appreciation for rails and all the stuff that you don't have to do or write in rails. At the same time you will have a better understanding of how a particular feature is working in rails. This improves your debugging skills because you know where to look for when something goes wrong. Finally Ruby is the elephant in the room so you need to be better at ruby to become excellent at rails, Which often is shadowed by the magic that rails provides, so learning RUBY first is more important than rails, sinatra or anything.