For months and months now I have asked myself, “Self, what language next, Ruby, Python, something else?” and has driven me crazy.  Someday I will ask myself why I spent so much time thinking about it instead of just digging in to something.  Well the real truth to that is time.  Sure I have spent time on the Ruby site going through browser-enabled 15 minute intro and some general reading.  It never really sticks until you throw together a couple of apps.

Over the last eight months I have been on a big web front end kick, getting myself up to speed on web display stuff like CSS, JavaScript, and jquery.  It’s been a lot of fun, but I really am not a good page designer, so besides reproducting current layouts there wasn’t a real lot for me to do.  

And there is always ASP.NET MVC which I have been following and learning off and on since August of 2008.  Having the web skills when putting together some learning MVC sites was really useful.  Don’t worry, I wont go on another, “I love MVC…”, rant.

Saturday morning I was in our local library with my two sons picking out movies reading some books, messing around and found myself at the card catalog computer screen.  Hey do you remember actual card catalogs, the rows and rows of drawers which contained cards of all the books in the library.  Here is one area computers help one-billion percent.  Anyway, I did my usual search for ASP.NET, came up with the same books as usual.  A 2008 book I had already checked out (and didn’t like too much) during my web learning, and some older stuff.  Oh hum I thought….

Than I had an idea and started typing

ruby programming

A match, wow a match and a recent book too.  I was was feeling a bit excited.  Okay, let’s try another

python programming

Ah, nothing on that one.  Well that settles it—right, wrong or indifferent, I will start with Ruby.  Well, I have always been leaning this way anyhow.  The exposure I have had, I have liked, now to come up with an app to put together.  Then of course if I get my arms around the language I will have to move on to Rails, and Iron Ruby (Uses .NET’s DLR).