When I was looking at the Ruby/RoR path, I started with Rails, took a step back to learn Ruby, then went back to Rails. At that point I decided to play with Sinatra a bit because I was getting overwhelmed with the Rails learning curve.
Sinatra was cool to get something out quickly for sure. I'm definitely glad I ventured out of the Rails sandbox a bit. That said, the quantity and quality of Rails resources on the web far exceeds that of Sinatra. For a beginner that is likely to encounter a ton of errors and bugs, there are simply more answers online for Rails than Sinatra. That can make the difference between giving up and keeping the excitement going which is crucial for a beginner.
If you find, like I did, that certain concepts are interesting, you will start to naturally peel back the layers of Rails magic on your own to learn what is going on under the hood.
Beyond that, Mike Hartl's Rails Tutorial is something I'd recommend to anyone learning to program as it seems to give solid coverage on ideas that are framework agnostic. Things like version control/Git/Github, writing unit tests and TDD, DRY, REST architecture, proper handling of authentication, etc.
There are so many different rabbit holes to go down, but I'm glad I did, because while I'm not deep on any of these areas yet, it has definitely given me a more complete picture of my projects, how to approach them, things to watch out for, etc.
So would you recommend Ruby over Python? That's the feel I am getting from your post. If so, why (besides the obvious resources you mentioned that are available for a noob like me)? Thanks so much by the way! Really excited.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to recommend one language over another for specific reasons. That said, from what I've gathered on reading more informed opinions on the matter, it is largely just that--opinion.
Many people prefer one language over another. Both core languages, Ruby and Python, have excellent documentation and resources online as well as strong communities around them.
My comment was speaking more specifically to the case of Sinatra vs. RoR. I feel like RoR simply has many more high-quality resources available on it than Sinatra does. This is likely due to how much more development occurs in RoR vs. Sinatra (pure speculation there).
Sinatra was cool to get something out quickly for sure. I'm definitely glad I ventured out of the Rails sandbox a bit. That said, the quantity and quality of Rails resources on the web far exceeds that of Sinatra. For a beginner that is likely to encounter a ton of errors and bugs, there are simply more answers online for Rails than Sinatra. That can make the difference between giving up and keeping the excitement going which is crucial for a beginner.
If you find, like I did, that certain concepts are interesting, you will start to naturally peel back the layers of Rails magic on your own to learn what is going on under the hood.
Beyond that, Mike Hartl's Rails Tutorial is something I'd recommend to anyone learning to program as it seems to give solid coverage on ideas that are framework agnostic. Things like version control/Git/Github, writing unit tests and TDD, DRY, REST architecture, proper handling of authentication, etc.
There are so many different rabbit holes to go down, but I'm glad I did, because while I'm not deep on any of these areas yet, it has definitely given me a more complete picture of my projects, how to approach them, things to watch out for, etc.