I would keep an open mind. PHP is a stepping stone in the natural progression of a web developer and is a good skill to have. If you are working with websites

I would keep an open mind. PHP is a stepping stone in the natural progression of a web developer and is a good skill to have. If you are working with websites you will naturally learn HTML and CSS, then javascript, then jQuery. Next you might move to wordpress based websites so PHP and MySQL would be the next things to learn. Next step would be your own web application. PHP and MySQL will work for your own web application. And I would recommend developing a few from scratch with just PHP and MySQL. Creating a login system and CRUD features. Creating these without a framework will give you a good foundation to know what's going on behind the scenes when you move on to a framework. Before developing a web app from scratch it's harder to understand what Rails is doing and why it's valuable. Once you do this then the next natural progression will be using a framework to create a web application. I recommend giving Rails and/or Laravel (PHP Framework) a try. Even though you will know more PHP than Ruby it's a good experience to see how Rails works and why it's so popular. Laravel is a good PHP framework similar to Rails if you want to stick with PHP. I wouldn't limit yourself to PHP though. Once you have been creating web applications it should be pretty easy to learn any framework/language. I prefer Rails and Laravel but that's just a personal preference. Back to your question. Ruby and Python (and their frameworks) are more elegant than PHP. But those choices have positives and negatives of course and depends on your clients as well. PHP is easy to learn so you have lots of bad code and bad practices out there. And there are things inherently wrong with PHP compared to other languages. But I think it's worth learning especially if you're involved with Wordpress. Check out TeamTreehouse.com and you'll learn some good programming practices to get you on the right track. If you're just getting started the Oreilly Head First books are really good for learning HTML and CSS and their Head First PHP & MySQL is good as well. After that you can check out railscast.com and laracast.com. There is lots of tutorials and information out there for all languages. Good luck.