[drunkenfly]

True. But not forget that you have tens of years experience of walking and running before you decided to improve your running. If you would have that many years of Ruby experience you would have better chance to get to TDD nirvana too.

[doktrin]

This. That said, since the OP is already a developer I would think he has sufficient base to dive into a RoR project should he desire.

Perhaps if his domain were radically different (say, embedded systems) he would need to explore the fundamentals of web application architecture before putting together a rails app.

That said, I still remain on team "learn the fundamentals", and have yet to find a truly compelling reason to take the "grok as you go" approach. Maybe I'm just stubborn.

[neilk]

Yeah, this spoils the analogy somewhat. Human beings are born to run. To get better, all you need to do is run a lot.

Compare this to swimming. There's no guarantee at all that you'll get better just by practicing - gliding through the water is more a matter of technique, and it doesn't come naturally to most people. One usually needs expert coaching.

I think programming is probably more like swimming than running.