I've been trying to learn some Rails and it's not that simple. People tend to say just read Hartl which is 804 pages according to Amazon. It may seem simple once you are familiar with a few dozen gems, action this, active that but there are a lot of bits to learn about.

I'd like to formally extend an open offer to help you or anyone else reading this to contact me for help if you're stuck learning Rails. Just reply with an email or some other mechanism and I'll follow up. If you have questions about best practices or you're just stuck on something, hit me up.

Hartl is great, has his/its place etc. Sometimes you just need a smart person with experience to add personal context. Happy to be of service.

Hi, if you are interested in helping people with their ruby/rails issues, there is also reddit / ruby discord / rails slack / and stack overflow. I'm trying to be active on Reddit and the Discord but not very active on slack/stack overflow. There are already quite a few people helping but more people would help :).

Ta.

True, any 15 year old framework will have bloat. But Rails is absolutely skinny compared to Spring, ASP and fellows. Its probably easier than a MEAN stack also.

That book is long, not because rails is bloated, but because there are very in depth sections building things from scratch like authentication that in practice are solved by gems. They are important for beginners to learn but are rarely reimplement from scratch in rails projects.