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Comment by phaus | Hacker News Reader

As a beginner trying to learn to program a long time ago, rails was possibly the worst resource I attempted to use. You follow a complicated, tutorial to set everything up so you can actually start. Then you type a few words and then a bunch of complicated looking files are generated automatically in a way that it's hard for a beginner to even know what sections he's supposed to be able to understand.

Maybe it clicks for some, but I had a better time starting with HTML/CSS and then learning JavaScript before moving on to Python.

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We realized the same thing—the Rails Tutorial is a little too advanced for complete beginners, so we created seven more beginner tutorials that work step by step to teach the prerequisites for full-stack web development. More info on the courses is available here: https://www.learnenough.com

Thanks for the response. Its great to see there's a more gradual way to get into the Rails tutorial now. I am aware that your original tutorial was probably not aimed at a complete beginner with no experience at all, but I was basing my comment off of the thread title which is "favorite tutorial for total beginners." I know your tutorial is considered by most to be great, I was just sharing my experience as someone that attempted to go from absolute zero to the Rails tutorial long ago. I hope I didn't seem like I was putting it down in general. I mostly work with Python scripting and Jupyter notebooks, but I've been wanting to get back into web development for personal projects. I'll check out the new courses.

No worries! Great to hear your perspective.

Nobody would recommend learning rails without a decent understanding of html, css and javascript.

I tend to agree with the notion that diving into rails is a difficult way to learn when you start from little or nothing.

The core issue is that Rails can do so much to help you out, which allows you to stumble your way through many issues and make things that do mostly work. While this is great for getting things done quickly at first, you might develop incorrect notions of where the abstraction layers' boundaries are which can make life difficult when you step outside of the box.

Now that's not to say you can't learn that way, or that tutorials couldn't be written that effectively teach using rails. It's just that there are dangers in learning first from a complete and robust framework that does such a good job of masking the complexity it encapsulates.

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