I went through a very similar process and I highly recommend it. I'm a web designer and I had a bit of experience with Javascript (just enough to be dangerous) but I really wanted to build an actual web application. I just couldn't seem to grasp OOP, but in hindsight it's because Javascript's OOP is so obfuscated.
I live in a small tourist town and I was surprised to find a local Ruby developer. We met up and I asked him to tutor me a couple of hours per week trying to build an actual Ruby on Rails application.
He set up the project structure and wrote a couple of tests, and I'd go back home and try to get those tests to green. Boy it was hard. I'd grind for days trying to get the last couple of tests to pass, so when we'd meet up for our weekly session he'd resolve them in just a couple of minutes and it made perfect sense. It was worth it just for those "ah ha!" moments.
Of course, the motivation isn't in learning the language/framework itself, it's in building something useful or meaningful to you.
In the end, with 2-3 hours of weekly mentoring, I was able to release the functional application in six months and learned tons in the process.
I live in a small tourist town and I was surprised to find a local Ruby developer. We met up and I asked him to tutor me a couple of hours per week trying to build an actual Ruby on Rails application.
He set up the project structure and wrote a couple of tests, and I'd go back home and try to get those tests to green. Boy it was hard. I'd grind for days trying to get the last couple of tests to pass, so when we'd meet up for our weekly session he'd resolve them in just a couple of minutes and it made perfect sense. It was worth it just for those "ah ha!" moments.
Of course, the motivation isn't in learning the language/framework itself, it's in building something useful or meaningful to you.
In the end, with 2-3 hours of weekly mentoring, I was able to release the functional application in six months and learned tons in the process.