[adriand]

I think part of the problem for beginners is that both the breadth and depth of the skills required for web development have increased so much. This post focuses on the depth required to learn Rails properly: you must understand Ruby (which is much more sophisticated than, say, PHP 3) as well as MVC, REST, and so on.

But at the same time, you are expected to develop for multiple platforms (desktops, mobile devices), to understand how to integrate with a wide variety of other services and APIs (Facebook, Twitter, S3, payment gateways), to know how to measure and optimize performance and other factors like conversion rates, and to understand SEO (which, just on its own, has a much larger learning curve than it did a few years ago), and that's just a limited selection.

There is, of course, one standard way to gain all of this knowledge: go and get a formal education in the field. But if you want to just dive in without that, these days that approach requires remarkable dedication and discipline, even if years ago it was a reasonable approach to learning.

[dignan]

I have yet to hear of a formal education which will teach REST, APIs, payment gateways, metrics tracking, and performance optimizations.

The only way to acquire these (and many other skills) is experience.

[prophetjohn]

Exactly my thoughts. I'm close to finishing a formal CS education and I've been working on learning Rails (off and on) over the last couple of months. Granted, I'm a full-time student with a close to full-time development internship, so I don't have a ton of time, but I've found a pretty steep learning curve on Rails. There's so many concepts that I haven't and won't be exposed to in my CS education that I have to learn on my own. I'm pretty good at Ruby, but beyond that, I've got a huge list of topics I need to dive into before I feel I could be a good Rails developer.