my father-in-law Alex has offered to try to set me up with a friend of his who is authoring a web application. The application will be sold/licensed to companies all over; it looks like a client management database system from what I've seen so far. I think this is awesome that he's helping me find clients but there are two complications: one, Alex was not able to provide a detailed description of either what exactly the software will do or what still needs to be done with the code, since most of it has already been written by some guys in India; and two, the whole thing is written in Ruby on Rails, with which I have literally no experience whatsoever.

Well I hate to pass up a work opportunity so I agreed to a meeting and spent a couple hours reading up on Ruby. I get the object.method syntax; it's just the whole language of commands that are unfamiliar to me. I guess I can deal with the absence of the brackets and semicolons that define my life in PHP.

Thing is, like I said most of the code is already written: I *think* what he wants is to modularize it to streamline and eliminate redundancies redundancies; and it will need some debugging. So, the tutorials I was reading were very helpful for basic functions like using puts instead of echo to make simple math calculations but I'm not yet confident that I would be able to very quickly be able to modularize and debug a large program that someone else had already written.

So, Tribeland, what's your experience with Ruby? Is there another site someplace that would enable me to quickly and easily master this language? JavaScript is the closest I've come to it before and there are some pretty significant differences. I told Alex that he should be honest with his friend about my level of experience so it's possible the meeting may never happen; but if it does, I'd like to be able to go in there and sound like I know what I'm talking about. Advice? Sites to check out? What would you do in this situation? Run away, or jump on the bull's back? Thanks!