Starting today: Should I learn Node.js & Express.js vs. Ruby on Rails?

Rails will get you to built prototypes a lot faster than Node will. I say this despite having at least 10k more hours working with JS than Ruby.

Also if you want to optimize for dev speed, I'd avoid front-end frameworks like React, Angular, etc and just use minimal JS where needed. If you need a full-blown single page app, then Vue is the quickest one to get started with.

As someone who has about 5+ years in node/react , use rails. As much as I love the stack, there is so much more to configure and tie together. Rails has done a great job of doing much of this for you.

As a testament to this I’m currently building my next project on rails. It’s just hard to argue with a toolset that lets you spin up Basic apps so quickly. Node is great, but still got a ways to go in this department.

Also my previous company tenrocket.com, still uses ruby/rails for development for all the startups they work with.

Anywhos use rails to start. :)

If you’re open to other suggestions. The Laravel PHP and VueJs stack is very easy to learn and is an incredible set of frameworks to work with. I would highly recommend them.

If you're already learning JS, I would say Node and Express

Honestly based on your description, I might direct towards something more like Sketch or a design app more suited to mockups as opposed to diving into actual development.

if you really wanna learn web development, maybe start with the end result and work your way backwards. I don't always use the same stack for every project. For example, I might build a blog using php/wordpress and spend most of my time in nginx configuring the caching to get the best performance. Solve the problem with the best tool for the job. I personally believe that javascript is the future, so I'd toss ruby on rails in favor of something like express. That being said, php and RoR are still very dominant in the server side rendering space. Javascript.info is a great site and resource for learning.

Definitely spend time learning object oriented programming in any language as a lot of those concepts carry over to anything.

Rails because its web development on easy mode. There tons of resources for beginners. Check out the Odin project (a free online bootcamp, with people to help you learn) and the launch school free ebook series.

I done the same last October and my web app will be launching within a month or so, just in time for my year anniversary of learning.

I greatly improved my JS knowledge by learning node.js, that is an advantage.

You are learning ES6, so I recommend you go with Node.js, Express.js, VueJs ..

Good luck!

Lots of answers here focused on the code itself, but if building POCs or prototypes is your target, why not something like Bubble or Wappler?

If starting today, I would say Node/Express.

This is gonna be slight controversial. Even though Node/Express is not latest kid on the anymore, Ruby/Rails (all the blocking frameworks) feels a little out of dated.

If you want to get up to speed on rails I have reviewed other peoples boilerplate Rails code that may get you where you want to be:

https://boilerplatecode.com

I also have some open source Rails boilerplate code that instantly auto generates an entire Rails site, with a default template, Stripe, etc... for you:

https://github.com/rails-boilerplate-code/base-template/blob/master/README.md

After you learn Node+express you can learn FeathersJS and achieve ruby levels of development speed, I'm using It for a year now and it's really fast to create a full featured backend in Feathers

Node + Typescript all day! I worked with a handful of different languages professionally, and I can honestly say that nothing compares to Node in terms of development speed.

I would recommend you start from an open-source project that is almost-what-you-want-but-not-quite and start hacking in whatever language that project is written in.

If you already know even some JavaScript, I'd recommend going with Node.js. That way you can use the same language for front end and back end (which is REALLY nice). Plus, Node.js is capable of scale.

I'd consider Flutter!

https://flutter.dev/

If you are not planning to become a profesional developer but only want to be able to quickly prototype focus on NodeJS ( Express) + React for frontend. This package will allow you to single handedly create a PoC of any idea.
Also with Node.js it is possible to use different serverless providers - this saves some time and increases the speed of creating your PoC.
Additionally I would also recommend you to try TypeScript .

No need to learn nodejs/express when you can just have an instant Real-Time GraphQL over PostgreSQL with Hasura.

Checkout https://hasura.io

Combined with React and Apollo Client that stack is very powerful!