Use javascript or Ruby?

If the purpose is for web development, JavaScript is likely a must. It's the only language that can be used to write programs that run in a user's browser. If you like Ruby as a language, you should totally go for that, too! On the backend, it's totally up to you what you're stack's like, so you can write just about whatever you want there

Thanks for the great advice, Eric! I am pretty far down the road with Ruby on Rails and am planning and starting to create a couple of websites using ROR and JavaScript on the front end. A few years ago I tried to learn C#/.NET on my own but wasn't too successful. I have had a hard time getting my head around object oriented programming and all the ways methods can be used and then creating your own methods etc., and then stringing them all together, but I am starting to get the hang of it with practice. Plus all the different languages have slightly different preferences for syntax, and convention, and keeping them straight is also taking a little practice.

I think with Microsoft's influence, C#/.NET will always have some level of popularity, that is why I tried to learn it first. Now that I have access to this wonderful Treehouse training system, I think I can learn just about any of these technologies.

Thanks, again!

Thanks, Michael. Yes, that was what I was thinking. It seems better to do as much as possible on the client side.

Andrew, Your question can only be answered with opinions, but there are some important points to make:

Ruby is a server-side language, meaning any logic you write in Ruby can only be run at the server, almost always as a pre-process to the server returning an HTML page to your site visitor's web browser. This logic is often to do something like interact with data in a database. Ruby is only one of many server-side languages, and they all can be used to accomplish the same server-side processing tasks: PHP, Python, C#, Java, etc. Relatively recently, JavaScript became a server-side language with the advent of Node.JS. Right now, server-side JavaScript is a trendy topic and some feel it is the "future" of programming. However, you can use any of the above-mentioned languages for server-side tasks, and many-many-many (most) of the biggest websites in the world use something that is NOT JavaScript as their server-side language.

However, JavaScript is ALSO a client-side language, which means it can run at your site visitor's web browser without requiring a page load or re-load. It is also really the ONLY language that you can trust to work on all browsers, because all browsers support JavaScript without any add-ons or explicit permissions. You use JavaScript in this client-side context, usually, for simpler reasons: you want to add interactivity or animation to the elements of a webpage. You can also use client-side JavaScript to do "heavier" tasks like send or retrieve data, through AJAX or APIs.

So with that all said, to answer your question about which language to use, you decide which to use based on whether your site needs server-side processing, or client-side processing. If you need to make a navigation menu open and close when a visitor clicks on a hamburger icon, that's client-side JavaScript. If you need to submit a form on an e-commerce website and save the visitor's purchase info in a database, you'd use Ruby or any other server-side language for that. You also might need to use a database language like MySQL or PostgreSQL if your site uses a database.

It really just depends what your website needs to do. Does that help?