Not yet on Rails

I have not yet stood on Rails to balance myself. I am just starting to know the building blocks. Before I can stand on the Rails, I have to learn Ruby and that's definitely the step one towards learning Ruby on Rails. It all started when I decided to develop a web based application. Not for a client, but for my personal creativity. At first I chose PHP to develop the web based application and that led me to read books on PHP. I have already worked on Perl for sometime. But that was like years ago and I know Perl has gone many changes after that. But still I always felt that Perl seemed kind of a geeky language or a language that is very similar to shell scripts. Being a Java developer, I always appreciated a programming language that is not geeky looking. When I say geeky looking I meant not having all those "$" characters appearing everywhere. Also Perl was not based on OOP. So I decided to try PHP. After reading books on PHP, I felt that I am getting dragged into the geeky world of programming again. The appearance of "$" sign everywhere and the non-OOP of PHP was not getting my favor that much. Thought PHP 5.x has OOP, but the lack of namespace was a complete turn-off. I know I would be using a scripting language, but I didn't want a language that would make me write more code to achieve something. It's not how fast I can write, it's about how much I can maintain later. Then I stumbled upon Ruby. To be honest, it looked funky at the beginning. A programming language that reads like English? A programming language that has poetry mode? Interesting things to notice and also got my curiosity. So I read a little bit and found Ruby more interesting. Yes, they have more "@" than "$" sign. But the complete OOP and the namespace etc. made it more worth trying than PHP. So I ordered the book The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton. I read the first 50 pages and realized that this would be the second book to read. I need to read Programming Ruby first and then come back to this book. The book is on order and once it reaches my desk I would read it. I will post my feedback in the subsequent post. Until then the balancing is not happening!