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Message: [QUOTE="Xavier Noria, post: 4644338"] I agree with that. In my view when you learn a technology you better be close the metal. I've known Java web developers that don't understand what's going on because they have started directly with the metaphors a framework gives on top of HTTP. I recommend them to pick a book on bare CGI programming, nothing like that let's you see how naked web programming is, and once you know what's going on *then* you are productive and know what you are doing with a framework. Similarly, IDEs understood as something you live in hide what's going on. And that includes the emacs guy that does everything in emacs, runs irb in emacs, runs the test suite in emacs, runs migrations in emacs, etc. That is an IDE in my definition of IDE. To someone who is learning I would recommend to use a simple editor that does syntax highlighting, and is free, like Smultron or Crimson editor, and understand the command line and environment which is natural to your programming language, in addition to PATH, RUBYLIB, what is a shebang in Unix, etc. I've been teaching Perl in the university for a few years and that's the way I do it. *Once* you know the basics, then you can jump to use a tool that let's you manage all that stuff in a proficient way. But then you are driving, you are in control, instead of having a bunch of fuzzy concepts that somehow work together. [/QUOTE]