I'm a self-taught programmer. I've been learning RoR since October with varying intensity (sometimes all day, sometimes nothing for several weeks). Before that I knew only Java, but knew it pretty well. I've heard so much hype about RoR and how it's supposed to make you happy, productive, etc. So far it's only made me frustrated. I learned it out of the Agile book, and I suspect part of the difficulty might have to do with my not knowing JavaScript and CSS, and having only a shaky grasp of databases and HTML. But apparently it took me much longer to complete the project in the Agile book than other people, and I still don't remember much of it. There are some things about Rails that I just can't seem to get, e.g. when to use symbols and when NOT to, or how dynamic methods are called.

Recently I was given a small Rails assignment where I'm asked to make a small change to the interface. It's taken me around 25 hours and although I've made some progress in understanding the code, I still have no idea how to proceed. I can't even ask Stack Overflow because there is so much code I'll have to provide to give context.

So my question is in the title: is RoR supposed to take a long time to learn or am I just slow? Can it be that I've been learning from the wrong book? My learning style is such that I either understand nothing or understand everything, if that makes sense.

Thanks!