Language & web framework advice?
donw: I spent a long time with Perl, and because of that, Ruby felt very, very comfortable.  Like Steve Yegge put it, you get the Best of Perl, without the Rest of Perl.  This isn't to say the language is without warts, but overall, it does a good job of getting out of your way.Rails isn't a bad thing to learn, if anything because it really does a good job of teaching MVC web application design.  And it makes development of CRUD apps happen very, very fast.