I went through a similar growth curve of being a total beginner to full-time Rails developer.

For tips: there's a lot of power in has_many :through. Watch the relevant Railscasts on has_many through and the Rails docs.

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#the-ha...

has_many :through handles the minority of complex data relationships, but it gets used a lot and is a great starting place and can probably be helpful immediately in your projects/tasks/comments app