I dove into programming in November as a complete newbie. I use every resource under the sun... railscasts, http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book, Treehouse, Codecademy, RailsTutors, This course, among dozens of others. This course is very well structured and offers a deep understanding into the Ruby language that none of the other resources compares to. For me, I take a bit from everything. I am confident that the route I am taking would blow away any formal education for building web applications. So a $199 price tag is extremely reasonable. There are other FREE ways to learn as well. To each their own.