[kohanz]

I was very impressed with Hartl's tutorial. Having tried many tutorials (for other technologies in the past), his was one of the best-written and most engaging. The fact that I completed it, including all the extra assignments, is a testament to how engaging it really is.

I can't say I've had a mentor yet, other than StackOverflow and random blog postings. I still consider myself a Rails n00b, but building a functioning web application in Rails is extremely easy. Doing it well and quickly, is probably something that will require more experience and mentorship.

[scubasteve]

I'm completely okay with moving from where I am to "complete n00b" :). I've always heard great things about Hartl's book, just never had the chance to sit through and keep going through it more than 1 chapter a week. Did you go through all the videos as well? Did you tackle TDD and git along the way?

[kohanz]

I only did the online version of the "book", so I don't know if we're talking about the same thing. I wasn't aware of there being videos, so no, I haven't seen those, but I have viewed numerous Railscasts since completing Hartl's initial introduction and those are invaluable too.

During the tutorial, I faithfully followed almost everything presented, including the extra work (e.g. using Postgres instead of MySQL so that the dev environment matches production more closely). This included TDD and Git. Git has been fairly painless because I have used Mercurial before and they are quite similar.

With my side project, that I started right after completing the tutorial, I initially used TDD extensively, for the basics of the model, but once the foundation was laid, I can't say that I have kept my test coverage up. I assume my story is not uncommon in that respect.