I’ve tried several times to learn RoR. I can get around Ruby in a haphazard manner. I’ve even written a few small RoR sites. But there was so much happening behind the scenes, under the hood, that I never felt happy with my knowledge and understanding of what was going on. Today while listening to @funkatron‘s EngineYard podcast, he mentioned that there was a ruby/erlang dev on their team. The dev found the code base much easier to parse and understand after switching from a full stack framework to Slim Framework .

People often post on user boards – “I want to learn php which framework should I use?”. If you’re going about learning a language by using a framework written in that language – stay away from full stack frameworks. You’ll have a much enjoyable time using a simpler more “declarative” framework.