well, I live in SF and feel relatively old and poor compared to most programmers making 100k anyway (24)

I'm applying to science phd programs and generally know basic stuff like MATLAB (e.g. to accomplish what I need for my work) and took intro to CS (java) in college, but I have a nice little idea that I'd like to sink some extra hours into while I still have time before I slave away in poverty in the name of science (but at least it's a field with plenty of private sector options). Basically I'm looking to do the following things:

- scour certain webpages for information systematically (I know where I need to pull the data from)
- organize it into a searchable database
- create a relatively functional and at least OK looking website.

HTML/CSS/javascript is the easy part since it's just a side project and I don't need any hardcore backend stuff, but what's a good approach to learning to program in Ruby? I used to toy with programming in HS back when PHP/mysql was standard, but I have no clue how to go about things these days, particularly for the first task. I also need to get in the mindset of an actual developer managing more than a straightforward matlab script.

what about c#? managed code is not that hard to understand, and you can find LOADS of examples, tutorials, also its quite comfortable to develop in visual studio. you can build a database, make webrequests, pull tha data you need, then use it as a background for you asp.net/silverligth/... page
also its a great oportunity to gain more knowledge about OOP, - as i could understand - you didnt operate that much with object orientation.

This post was edited by kuzdithom on Jun 2 2012 04:39am

I'm a software engineer with a degree in CS working in bioinformatics so I think we might have some similar interests. PM me and we can talk.