I'd have loved to know about such a thing at the time! One wonders why none of the people in the various IRC channels and forums where I then sought Rails advice saw fit to mention it.
In entire, albeit mildly grudging, fairness, I do have to concede that Rails introduced me to the concept of unit testing. But I'm still glad I learned modern backend development in the years immediately after Rails peaked, and while the worthwhile was being sorted from the nonsense among the many concepts and approaches that Rails does, for better or worse, deserve credit for having made newly popular.
But rails was modern backend development back then, it offered an alternative to a world full of mod_perl, PHP4, Java servlets with JSP and XSLT.
Having had the displeasure of working on all those stacks it's hard to overstate how transformative rails was at the time for me.
Built in unit testing is one thing, not having to write a java class to expose a custom function to an xslt processor in order to format a string is something else.
In entire, albeit mildly grudging, fairness, I do have to concede that Rails introduced me to the concept of unit testing. But I'm still glad I learned modern backend development in the years immediately after Rails peaked, and while the worthwhile was being sorted from the nonsense among the many concepts and approaches that Rails does, for better or worse, deserve credit for having made newly popular.