Rails - Aug 2014 - My Rails Learning Experience- What are your thoughts on help options?

I am new to Rails.  I have done the Rails Tutorial by Hartl 
<http://www.railstutorial.org/> I have done the Ruby tutorial at 
Code Academy <http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/ruby> , completed the the
Engineering
Berkeley Software as Service 
<https://www.edx.org/course/uc-berkeleyx/uc-berkeleyx-cs169-1x-engineering-1377>course,
done a Coursera course <https://www.coursera.org/course/webapplications>, 
 and read a few basic books (Ruby on Rails 4 Guide 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1491054484/ref=pe_385040_30332190_TE_M3T1_ST1_dp_1>
).

First of all, the tutorial by Hartl is excellent.  Really helped me get an 
overview.  It's where I should have started my quest, but I started with 
the Coursera course which was really a copy-paste exercise.  I then did the 
EdX (Berkeley) course which was pretty hard but the Ruby part was good.  I 
did not do any pairing in the course and had lots of trouble toward the end 
getting the RSpec testing concepts.  I got the certificate but did not feel 
confident to go on to part 2.  I then did the Hartl tutorial which 
clarified a lot.  The ruby course at Code Academy was very good too 
(prerequisite for EdX course)

I am stuck on my first app. I find myself re-reading general documentation 
for answers which is getting old.  I picked up the Rails 4 Way book but 
that looked a bit advanced.  I have read so general stuff much that I am 
forgetting basics ;-) - like how to use Ruby.

I wonder how to get specific help when you work alone, are self funded, and 
do not have a budget for support or training.  I posted a question to stack 
overflow, but a few days have gone by and not usable answer yet.  I have 
heard of airpair <http://www.airpair.com/> but could run up a bill pretty 
fast with $60-90+ per hour.  

Any ideas or general thoughts on getting help with projects when you hit a 
snag or want a feature that is beyond your current abilities?  I used 
elance for a php project once.  Result took much longer than promised and 
had lots of mistakes before it was right.  I have again begun to wonder 
about using contractors from on one of these elance type sites. What have 
you tried when hitting a roadblock or have bigger vision than current 
skills?

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Ruby on Rails: Talk" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to
rubyonrails-talk+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org
To post to this group, send email to
rubyonrails-talk-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/1ddb4f59-3008-4876-a2eb-5e45a7755e2b%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.