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Comment by adambair | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Unfortunately I think it's becoming more difficult for beginners to get up and running with Rails. Perhaps that's how a community evolves... or perhaps I'm no longer the target audience ;)

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I agree, what he doesn't say is how much effort is often needed to get all of the moving parts working together. For example, integrating Devise with RSpec and Cucumber. And then switching to an ORM such as Mongoid. A good tutorial like Michael Hartl's teaches the basics of Rails but putting together your basic starter app can get complicated. Sometimes it takes combing through a dozen (mostly outdated) blog posts to find how things are supposed to be done "Time.now".

I recently put together several detailed tutorials along with application templates that generate Rails starter apps using Devise, OmniAuth, RSpec, Cucumber, plus options for jQuery, Haml, etc. I loaded them up to my GitHub account and initially I was surprised at how many people were expressing appreciation and encouraging me to do more. Now I think I realize, it's not easy for many people to keep up with the ever-evolving Rails habitat. There's really a need for guidance that goes beyond the good intro tutorials and shows the steps need to assemble the pieces for real-world projects.

edit:

Here's a link to my GitHub account with the various example apps and tutorials:

https://github.com/fortuity

Thanks so much for this. There are so many rails tutorials for absolute beginners, and lots of stuff that assumes expert knowledge, but not much, besides practice, to span the gap.

I've used your rails3_devise_wizard to get-up-and-running on a recent project, and to experiment with difference stacks and it is really useful. Projects like yours and http://railswizard.org are really useful for customizing the default Rails3 stack and customizing a customization of a given stack. Thank you.

I found most of the official resources to be good, the issue I often run into is that if you google for anything you will end up on a blog post from 2007 about Rails 2 that doesn't really apply anymore.

Select a time range in Google search. For Rails stuffs I usually do 6 months (custom range).

Or maybe it will be the death of Rails.

The alure once was how quickly developers can build web apps. It seems to be becoming more limited to how quickly experienced Rails developers can build web apps.

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