RoR Pros: Ruby is easy to learn, Rails is opinionated which makes learning a little easier and gets you used to the MVC concept (not sure if Express is similarl

RoR Pros: Ruby is easy to learn, Rails is opinionated which makes learning a little easier and gets you used to the MVC concept (not sure if Express is similarly so). Ruby and Rails are pretty mature, so there are gems (libraries) for just about anything you can think of. RoR Cons: You still need to properly learn JS because it's the web. Node is now the "cool" thing, so there seems to be a lot more attention on it as of late. On other things: make sure to learn SQL on it's own. ORMs are awesome but sometimes it's easier to write a custom query. It will also make debugging DB stuff a lot easier since the error messages (at least in Rails) usually contain the query where it went wrong. Haven't used Node yet so I feel unable to contribute anything on that other than that it's the same language on front and backend, so that might be easier.