<< So she's thinking about learning some kind of web-design and making her own website, including maybe allowing online sales at some point. She ran across a training class on Ruby on Rails and thinks that's the ticket... What I've googled about it doesn't make it look as easy as what she says the literature makes it appear... >>
It is not easy. Web programming is never easy but Ruby on Rails is, in particular, not easy. What it is is fast, if you understand the underlying concepts -- things like closures, function pointers, and list comprehensions. If you can handle this stuff, plus Ruby's "way of doing things". I tied Ruby once and didn't like it. I prefer Python, an equally powerful but more "explicit" language, and its various web frameworks (I recently spent some time with CherryPy, which I found excellent). Also, Ruby on Rails is not a design package of any type but rather a server-side programming language for dynamic web sites. It is not a complete solution for web development (you still need to know HTML, CSS, some HTTP, a database language, and probably a separate HTML templating language). Unless someone really wants to invest a lot of time and effort into learning web development, using a "generator" type product (like R: Web Suite) makes sense. For the design side of the equation, she could try the program Artisteer, which can produce some very nice designs using a GUI. -- Larry
