Should I Start With Rails??

Absolutely you should not start with Rails.

My path to getting a job can be summed up like this:

1. From 'ground zero', signed up with Treehouse,
2. Did HTML/CSS
3. Tiny bit of Javascript; wanted to be a Web Designer
4. Switched to Ruby; decided on going down the Backend route
5. Learned some Ruby
6. Learned Rails, built lots of stuff with it,
7. Hit brick wall; realised I had a massive hole in my knowledge that was only getting bigger and bigger. Couldn't reach next level of skill / complexity.
8. Realised I had two options: plug away on my own for another year or pay for a coding bootcamp.
9. Chose the latter (Makers Academy in London),
10. Did Makers Academy,
11. Got a job at Sky in Leeds as a Developer (Junior, of course),
12. Gained the knowledge of what I should have done but, unfortunately, this knowledge would have been extremely difficult to get on my own without doing Makers Academy and getting a job.

I will now quickly sum up what I now know. I should probably write a blog post about this so I don't keep having to repeating myself on this forum.

Despite being a Moderator, I will bestow upon you what I believe to be Treehouse's big dark secret: They don't teach you what you really need to know because it would be bad for business. I'll elaborate...

There are two MAJOR things they don't cover in nearly enough depth that you need to know to get a job: TDD and Design Principles. Last week they added a 'Design Principles' workshop to their library, thankfully, but it's really only a starting point. They also have some stuff on RSpec and other testing libraries, but it's not something that is embedded in the rest of their tutorials.

It would be bad for business because learning TDD and really internalising Design Principles is hard to learn and hard to teach. By omitting these things they deliver more 'instant gratification' for their users, which keeps the subscriptions going. Can't blame them, really.

In my professional opinion, it's very unlikely you'll get a job without this stuff.

Thankfully, (some) help is at hand in the form of an excellent book by Sandie Metz: 'Practical Object-Oriented Design In Ruby'. This has your back covered for Design Principles.

List of tasks you need to complete before even THINKING about Rails:

• Work your way through the pure Ruby modules on Treehouse
• Find a book on RSpec and TDD that DOES NOT use Rails (they do exist). Read it.
• Read that Sandie Metz book I mentioned.
• Write a Rock/Paper/Scissors game in pure Ruby, using TDD, that can be played in the Terminal. Have a professional Ruby developer review your code. Pay them if you have to. This stage is CRITICAL and, if you get it right, you are on your way to getting a job.
• Hook up your Rock/Paper/Scissors app to a browser, using Sinatra, and using TDD, so you can play it in your browser. If you manage to do this you are ahead of 99.9999% of everyone else on Treehouse and you are close to being able to get a job. To get this far you will likely have had to pay someone to help you out. Nothing wrong with that.
• Do more stuff like this with different domains eg making a Battleships game is the classic test. You can google for more.
• Once you've done three or four of these and you have had a good professional Ruby developer review your code and tell you it's good, then and only then should you move onto Rails.

The above is hard - really hard, but more than possible if you're determined. The fast-track way through this is to pay for a bootcamp, but not everyone has a spare few thousand lying around.

If anyone thinks I'm wrong, they are more than welcome to criticise what I've said, but I'm unlikely to agree unless you're a professional developer.

PS You don't need to know Rails to get a job. In fact, you might be better off without it.
PPS Here is my CV as it was when I applied for my present job.