Ruby on Rails for Beginners: Building Modern Web Applications from Scratch

I bought this little book written by Maxwell Rivers in 2023 hoping to learn more about Ruby & Rails. Well, I have a mixed feeling about this booklet's promise on the back: "No prior coding knowledge is necessary ... you'll be building your web apps in no time".Too good to be true. I learned nothing new about Ruby (ch. 2) as an OO programming language, except that it offers "duck typing". But how this works is not explained.From chapter 3 onwards, all is about Rails. Well, that's OK, as the goal of the booklet is to teach web development, not "YAPL". And there are plenty of books and websites that teach you how to program in Ruby — I'll turn to those in the next days.But what about the books promise with regard to web development using Rails? Well, if one happens to be a web app developer using another IDE with the necessary tools on board or as plug-in, than the book's promise may hold. If not, this booklet is a sure recipe for feeling overwhelmed and depressed. Why? Because Rails is just the top of an iceberg. It is a super-tool that sits on top of an endless list of other (smaller) tools that you should already know and have worked with, or that you are willing to learnand use on your journey with Rails.The booklet is based on a fallacy for which I have found this metaphor: it promises to become a good composer of fine pieces ("apps") for orchestra by spelling out the minute details of the structure of an orchestra: the dirigent (RAILS), the musicians each with their own instruments ("tools"), the technical people in the background, the scores (languages, scripts,...), the stage (OS?), the concert hall, etc. etc. NowI can talk about all these things or listen to other people talking about it without really understanding how it could ever result in Beethoven's 9th. Or write my own piece of music that would please both musicians and the public over there ...In short: each of the chapters 3 up to 9 is nothing but a glossary and laundry list for several textbooks on 7 more or less independent topics, each worth a semester-long course.