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 Sometimes it takes combing through a dozen (mostly outdated) blog posts to find how things are supposed to be done "Time.now".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