[studiofellow]

I'm a designer who learned Rails to build a web app, and the learning curve was steeper than I expected. I still don't know everything on this graphic.

I bought several rails books, read the humble little ruby book, pro git, github docs, rvm, etc. I still suck at testing and lots of other important stuff.

That's part of learning programming in general, but "learning Rails" is often presented to be much simpler than it really is. There are so many dependencies. A graphic like this should be at the front of every single Rails book, just so newbies can see what to expect.

[shane-armstrong]

It would most likely scare them off, if they were coming from little to no programming experience, but I agree. In fact, I think that what you said applies to most languages, learning them is often a lot harder then it is portrayed.

I for one am sick of hearing "Learn Python in just ten days", "Learn Ruby, the easy way!", "PHP Programming in ten minutes or your money back"... you get the idea.

But if it was easy, there would be a lot more developers and companies like Google and Apple would not pay half as much as they do, nor specifically head-hunt talent, it would come begging to them, so I suppose that there are both pros and cons to this.

[xyzzyb]

I haven't heard phrases like that since browsing book covers years ago. In large part -- although perhaps just online -- the programming community seems to have moved on from the "Hey, this is so easy! Buy my book!" phase.

We now have tutorials that try to make the case "Hey, this is so simple and intuitive if you are already a programmer with a solid foundation in the language that we designed our tool for!"

And we have the Learn X the Hard Way books, starting with the awesome: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/