There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails. For example, an article in OnLAMP.com claimed that “you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework...” The article then goes on to show how to install Rails and Ruby on a PC and build a working ‘scaffold’ application with virtually no coding.

While this is impressive, ‘real’ web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. ‘Real’ applications aren’t as simple as that. What’s actually going on beneath the surface? How hard is it to go on and build ‘real’ applications?

This is where life gets a little tricky. Rails is well documented on-line – in fact, possibly too well documented for beginners, with over 30,000 words of on-line documentation in the format of a reference manual. What’s missing is a roadmap (railmap?) pointing to the key pages that you need to know to get up and running in Rails development.

This document sets out to fill that gap.