Hey I'm Alex, one of the cofounders of BaseRails. There's a lot of great advice in this thread already, but here are my two cents. Learning the fundamentals of coding is somewhat different from learning to code to build X. If you're focused on the latter, find a good tutorial on how to build something similar to X (or a simplified version of X). You'll pick up the basics of the language/framework along the way, and when you've finished the tutorial, you can then customize what you've built to match the app you were envisioning all along.

If you have any specific questions about BaseRails or Rails/coding in general, I'm happy to help. Feel free to reply back here or shoot me an email at alex@baserails.com.