I am new to this community, but I am working on a site that requires implementation of a user/password/register check upon entry, which would check against a database, or write to the database, in the case of registration. I have experience with XHTML and CSS, and just discovered RoR. I honestly have very little insight into how to achieve my goal using just XHTML, so I decided to learn Ruby, taking a shot in the dark. I'm wondering if there's an easier language, or more direct fix that I should be implementing instead. Any thoughts?
I would recommend looking at Restful Authentication.
Also, for good code examples in general, have a look at Altered Beast. It's a forum built in Ruby on Rails and it uses Restful Authentication.