choochootrain

I'm just starting to get into web development, and it looks like theres alot of choices out there. I dont really have an idea in mind, but I just want to start tinkering. I've heard of the LAMP stack, but I'm leaning more towards Ruby and Rails.

Some of the frameworks I've read about and considered are Rails, Sinatra, CakePHP, node.js?, and some others in Erlang, Java, and Lisp.

To me, it looks like all these frameworks provide the same functionality, but with different languages, databases, and web servers. Is there some kind of way to choose, or do you just pick one that youre familiar with?