I want to echo some of the comments in here: it doesn't matter what you think you will be developing with in the future, or what the framework du jour is (although some may say it is still Rails); if you want to learn how to build something, there is no better place to start than with this tutorial.
For all the "non-technical" people out there who want to see their ideas come to life, who are considering hiring contractors or paying for a class, or posting on HN or founder dating for a technical co-founder, stop. Take a step back. Forget about your idea for a week or two and immerse yourself in this tutorial and learn about what it takes to put something together. You and your software related projects will be better for it.
Wow, thanks! If you might be willing to let me use some of this for a testimonial on the site, please shoot me an email at admin at railstutorial dot org. (That goes for the other commenters on this story as well. Thanks to all of you for the awesome comments!)
I am in a completely unrelated field (SAP ERP), and I enjoy your books. I really, really love the whole "soup to nuts" emphasis of your books, even if I have no interest in being a professional RoR Developer, it gives me a perspective on how and where the industry as a whole is going that you can't get from reading a bunch of websites.
I think it does. I didn't know any Ruby before I started the tutorial, and I have long since forgotten the Ruby that I learned (because I don't use it daily). But I think a lot of the value depends on what you are looking for and how familiar you are with web development generally.
The magic of the tutorial (to me) is that it tries to package together the entire development cycle for you. It gives you the foundation for building a real usable, launchable application. Concepts like authentication and authorization are extremely important and usually not covered very well. You learn to set up heroku and push updates. You learn testing, version control etc.
For someone who has finished codeacademy, javascriptissexy, etc., I think a common problem is, "ok great ,I understand for loops, and while loops, wtf do I do now? I have this CRUD problem I want to solve that no one else is solving. How do I put it together? I want a login page. I need to input information. How do I connect all this?"
Once you finish this tutorial, you know what the process looks like for Rails. Then you can genericize your knowledge and explore Sails, Meteor, Django, Flask, Ember, MEAN, Play, etc with a foundation and an ability to start asking questions.
Yup, even relatively new to programming as well (at least, it was immense use for me). You learn a lot of other things as well, including some tooling of the modern developer (working with Git, working with a PaaS like Heroku), and a bit about databases, unit testing, HTML markup, and CSS.
Not everything will necessarily click for you as you read it, but it is a great entry point.
Absolutely. Ruby is one of the easiest programming languages to get up and running with. It also has some of the coolest metaprogramming techniques I have ever seen.
For all the "non-technical" people out there who want to see their ideas come to life, who are considering hiring contractors or paying for a class, or posting on HN or founder dating for a technical co-founder, stop. Take a step back. Forget about your idea for a week or two and immerse yourself in this tutorial and learn about what it takes to put something together. You and your software related projects will be better for it.