In my opinion though, you should focus on versatility and ALSO learn about Python on Django, AngularJS, and Dart. Once you learn those conventions it won't be much of a stretch to learn whatever your potential employer or client wants to use. You'll also be able to explain to your colleagues why they should choose on over the other.
Our dev teams that have adopted it like it, and it's been very successful for them.
Dart's very similar to JavaScript in a lot of ways, especially most of the syntax. The main difference is that programs have a static shape, which makes tooling and reading a codebase much, much easier.
As with any framework, once you get really familiar with how it works, you'll enjoy the benefits. If you learn it well enough, you'll be able to take some of the concepts/philosophy from Rails and apply them elsewhere.
http://www.slideshare.net/NeilGreen1/framework-fanboys
Learn Rails, Django, and other frameworks. If you can make something using a library instead of a framework, then do it. Use the tools that are right for the job.
I recently graduated college, and had already worked with Rails and Django. My first job out of college uses Spring MVC. I'm on my 3rd (back-end) web framework.
Once you get pretty comfortable with 1 or 2 frameworks, it's that much easier to pick up a new one. Each framework has pros and cons. Certain things integrate better with certain frameworks.
Again, use the right tools to solve your problem and don't be a framework fanboy!
Avoid jobs that require you to be an expert at a particular framework in the door.
Not really.
> is it worth my time to learn for employment opportunity
Yes, if you're interested.
> what is the hottest things right now in development job market
You really can't go wrong with JavaScript in general. Its a requirement for UI development on web apps, and it can also be used for many other things.
Server side web frameworks in general have been stagnating, but for the most part they're still necessary. Rails is great. So is Django, .Net MVC, Express.js, Yii etc. Also learn JavaScript and some front-end frameworks Angular, react, etc.
There is also a lot of interesting work being done outside of the web e.g. mobile, embedded systems, data analysis. Find something you think is interesting and go for it!
Another change is that more and more startups are launching with just a mobile app, meaning Swift, Obj-C, and Java will be in demand.
Pardon, but how is this stupid? Given the descriptions of people he has provided, I - as a system administrator - would want absolutely nothing to do with such people having root access on my servers.
Hell, that's how it is at my current dayjob. Most of the devs do have root access because we know they're competent enough to be able to handle that level of responsibility (not to mention that we're a small team, and I'm the only dedicated sysadmin, so it's nice to have the devs be crosstrained for simple tasks like basic server provisioning while leaving me to more difficult tasks like stack design and low-level Unixy troubleshooting goodness), but our setup's engineered in a way that code deployment does not require superuser privileges.
Where? Rails is still incredibly popular last I checked. It's not getting as much press lately as, say, Node.js or whatever frameworks Go has, but the job market for Rails developers is still pretty strong, if not one of the strongest.
> what is the hottest things right now in development job market ?
COBOL.
I shit you not.
You would not believe how many government agencies, financial institutions, healthcare facilities, etc. still rely upon ancient COBOL codebases running on ancient mainframes that are currently maintained by ancient programmers on the verge of retirement. New COBOL programmers are in very high demand, but the supply is atrociously low (for good reason; COBOL makes PHP look as elegant as Lisp in comparison). If you can list COBOL expertise on a CV/resume, you will be hired; it's cheaper to hire you for hundreds of dollars an hour than to hire a full development team for even more hundreds of dollars an hour to migrate to a modern platform.
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If, on the other hand, you're not in a masochistic mood, you're pretty well served learning Rails (or any other "model-view-controller" or "MVC" framework, like Django or Catalyst or what have you); once you're intimately familiar with MVC concepts and how your models/views/controllers are implemented and interact with one another, moving to another framework is just a matter of learning new syntax.
If that's not enough, might I suggest Erlang/OTP (or perhaps its children, like Elixir or LFE)? It's been getting some well-deserved praise lately for being very well suited for networked software development (including web development). If you're already familiar with Ruby/Rails, Elixir (along with one of the web/MVC frameworks for it, like Phoenix or Sugar) would be a good fit. Quite a few projects use Erlang extensively (Heroku, GitHub, and (if I remember right) Chef use a lot of Erlang, usually to route requests to subprograms written in other languages like Ruby). If nothing else, though, it'll give you a good background in concurrent programming, knowledge of which is increasingly sought after in modern web-facing application development (as evidenced by the recent popularity of Go and Rust, both of which promise better concurrency models than existing non-Erlang solutions).
While you're at it, being familiar with JSON and SQL is a good thing, regardless of what other technology/ies you end up going with; even if you don't ever work with those things directly, JSON and SQL (particularly in the form of PostgreSQL) are increasingly-ubiquitous in modern web-facing software (which is where most of the market is).
In reality, unless you're learning something fairly exotic (like Prolog or PL/I) or absurdly new, you'll be fine job-wise. Even languages whose glory days have faded - like PHP and Perl - have lots of job opportunities, whether from existing codebases needing maintenance (Wordpress comes to mind) or relatively-new codebases that still feel those languages are the best fit (DuckDuckGo comes to mind). Java - like COBOL but not quite like COBOL - is another example of a language with a lot of enterprise users in high demand for those fluent in it to help maintain those codebases.
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In summary, yes, Rails is totally worth your time to learn for employment opportunity. It still has a very strong job market, and even if it someday doesn't, the MVC concepts you'll learn by learning Rails will apply directly to most other modern (and probably future) web frameworks, thus helping you learn those new frameworks and continue to be employable.
That all said, learning a language or framework or somesuch solely because it'll easily land you a job is a good way to make you hate programming someday. Learn a language because you like that language, not just because you want a paycheck.
In terms of employment, it's better to learn PHP and Python.
Who are these "Rails advocates" who have moved from Rails, a server-side framework, to client-side frameworks? Since they've moved on from Rails and apparently no longer need a server-side framework, are their projects powered by third-party APIs?
> In terms of employment, it's better to learn PHP and Python.
Which PHP or Python framework is more popular than Rails? Not Laravel or Django.
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=PHP+Laravel&l=San+Francisco%2C+...
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Python+Django&l=San+Francisco%2...
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Rails+Ruby&l=San+Francisco%2C+C...