I've decided to make my course on complete full-stack web development free, forever! It's a massive amount of content. Please let me know what you think of the course!
I'm loving it. Obviously the "here are some commands" and "go find Google Chrome" made me laugh a little but I understand the audience they're for. I love how quickly we get into actually creating something, it keeps my interest when I see progress. It's been 15 minutes and I already have a Rails blog set up, yay!
Seriously, I haven't gotten that far in, but right now I'm fully believing there is a success story with your teaching method. Congrats, that's not an easy feat.
Message me if you have any questions along the way. I'm here to help.
Start looking into gems (devise for logins, paperclip for file attachments, and many more). You'll quickly see how things can be put together easily.
Rails' biggest downside isn't getting something working, it's customizing it for what you want.
I guess that's why PHP being embedded in HTML allows me to see the bigger picture.
First, from what I understand, Rails has a lot of "magic". So on that note, you're probably just not going to like Rails or Rails-like frameworks in general (like Django, lots of magic). PHP or even something like Flask might be better for you. Different people like different levels of abstraction, and believe it or not you can write web pages in C. PHP was originally designed as an abstraction over C, to add a little "magic" so you didn't need to know how things worked under the hood in order to get a web page running. These days, Rails is the new magic, and PHP is the new "under the hood".
Secondly, the course does go into more detail later on (I'm on #20 of the "build a saas app" right now), where after every video that you write code, there's a video that explains why you did that and what it does to the program. It actually goes into more detail than I was expecting for a tutorial that starts off with "here's how to install Google Chrome".
As it looks like after completing this course people should be quite capable to build their own solutions, I would recommend you to cover the security aspect more broadly.
Perhaps cover multiple commonly known attack vectors (and how they are mitigated) and basics of the cryptology.
I would also suggest you (based on the other comment here) to not push Chrome only. It is very important for our liberty to have various actively used browsers.