Some free Rails Tutorial screencasts

You have to pay the toll somehow. Whether that's the structured , straightforward learning curve of a framework or managing your own delicate menagerie of glue code, dependencies, and ad-hoc anti-patterns.

What's hard about web development is that most resources are one-dimensional. You've got your Git 101 and your Javascript 101 and your SQL 101. You understand closures and interactive rebasing and inner joins -- the easy stuff. The hard part is putting it all together and building a workflow out of it.

That's why Hartl's tutorial is such a good resource.