Ruby is a dangerous language. It is so dominated by Rails that you will likely end up warping your mind into thinking that the ActiveRecord pattern is the best

Ruby is a dangerous language. It is so dominated by Rails that you will likely end up warping your mind into thinking that the ActiveRecord pattern is the best way to manage data and that every problem can be solved with a web app. I would suggest learning Python instead because there is more diversity in the Python community (or should I say communities?). Compare the communities around http://ipython.org/notebook.html http://ipython.org/notebook.html and http://www.gevent.org/ http://www.gevent.org/ and http://plone.org/documentation/#developer_doc http://plone.org/documentation/#developer_doc