Web development was never friendly. All the tools you mentioned including Rails are only making it easier and easier. You have to pay the toll somehow. Whether

Web development was never friendly. All the tools you mentioned including Rails are only making it easier and easier. 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.