What is Ruby?

What is Ruby on Rails and Ruby used for?

I do not understand what PERL is for, when there's mySQL.

Then I've heard about this other thing called AJAX that's being used as a flash alternative. (roll overs, expanders, etc.)

This isn't for me, this is for all those noobs out there as well.

Not for you eh . Don't worry, I hear you. *wink*wink*

Ruby is another language, RoR is a framework written in ruby which provides premade objects which speed up development (similar to things like CakePHP or the Zend Framework in PHP).

Perl is yet another language, and one which pops up all over the place, it's generally used to manage/format/handle text etc, etc.

MySQL is an RDBMS (relational database management system) which uses the client/server model. You have the MySQLd (MySQL Daemon) which runs in the background on the server and does the database storage, searching, indexing, etc (see what a DBMS is for more info on what it does). Then you write programs which use client libraries to connect to the server and execute SQL code on them to select, update, delete, etc information.

AJAX is nominally "Asynchronous Javascript and XML", but colloquially means anything in Javascript which fetches dynamic data (increasingly as JSON as opposed to XML) and uses something like the Document Object Model to dynamically place it in the layout without any page refreshes.

cant we creat 1 language with thousands of variables ? set in ONE simple way ?

i mean if i have to list all the languages that exist... damn, can't think of where to start.. well now i know Python but anyways, so many to learn in such a SHORT time :/ damn they aint making our lives easyer.... what sucks is once we will get these languages... new ones will be out :/ sucks huh ?

well the c language has been around for like 22 years.

Once you learn the fundamentals of programming, it isn't too difficult to switch between languages. Many use similar syntax, such as PHP, actionscript, javascript, java, C,C++,C#. The differences are in how they are used.

The only languages I can code fluently on are CSS, HTML, and Actionscript.

XyberForce welcome to my world :'(

well action script... i suck.. but not that hard... im looking around PHP and java .. and now Python !!!! woot !

Same here I'm lookin at some PHP tutorials.

damn, i can feel you !

The first thing I ever learned for the web, outside of HTML, CSS, VBScript, and JavaScript, was JSP... Server-Side Java Code. I've only briefly dealt with ASP, and now am learning PHP. It seems JSP isnt the most popular, as for some code I wrote using it for a client, I had to specifically call for it's setup from the web-host. The poor guy didn't set it up very often... so it took a little extra time to get it done.