Is it outdated though? I've been focused on using node/express and it straight forward and all JavaScript. But I have heard you can learn good practice from rails. Should I spend time learning rub/rails?
For five years Node has been excellently positioned to defeat Ruby on Rails as the goto framework of choice, but due to the community's fragmentation I still don't believe there is a web framework in the node ecosystem that is even close to being as complete, as handy, and as rapid for development as Ruby on Rails still is.
But I'm willing to stand corrected, because Node holds the capability to revolutionize writing single page web apps (SPA) the way rails did for database-backed server-side apps ten years ago.
(I.e. is there a Node SPA equivalent that can automagically build with a one line scaffold command what Rails did for CRUD?)
To throw a curve ball ... I actually use Elixir/Phoenix for all my new web projects. It's new, a bit Ruby/Railsish, functional, high performance. Combine it with Elm on the front end and you have a lot of power as well as programming tool goodness.
