I studied on my own for a year before attending the Summer session of Dev Bootcamp. I found that the available resources for learning Rails are not really that great for beginner. They are more geared toward people who already know how to make sites through other frameworks/languages.

I actually built two Rails apps on my own before attending Dev Bootcamp, but the quality of my code was horrible. I was able to fill in my gaps at knowledge about Rails and Object Oriented design and testing, and can now write nice clean code, versus guessing and putting bandaids on bad code.