My path to learning ruby and later rails started off by working through the Mike Hartl rails tutorial and doing the codeschool courses. but then what? I had no where to go after that. Everyone told me to build my own app but there were still many questions that I needed answered. This is where the RailsApps really stepped in and helped me out. It was a great place to go for code inspiration and pointed me toward a solution to problems I had run into. It also gave me a gateway into open source work by contributing tests to a few of the projects. So kudos to Daniel for picking up the newbies that have worked through a few tutorials and books and guiding them through the transition into junior developers.