Jay Fields has an insightful article on the fact that, while it’s relatively easy to get started with Rails, experts aren’t born overnight.
It is easy to learn Rails and quickly become productive. However, the dirty little secret is that it’s very hard to be come an expert at utilizing Rails.
Reading Beginning Rails will not make you an expert. It will introduce to you the Rails philosophy, and take you through the basics, but in order to build a successful web application using Rails, you need to become proficient in a lot of technologies. Web applications have a lot of moving parts. In addition to learning Ruby, you’ll need to learn SQL, JavaScript, Ajax, HTML, and YAML, and a collection of others. You’ll also need to learn how to test, and how to debug. If your web application is to become popular, you’ll need to learn how to scale it in a production environment and how to optimize your database server.
There is no shortcut to success here. Mastering web development takes time and effort. Reading a book like Beginning Rails is really only the first of many investments in your knowledge portfolio, something that requires constant investment over time.
