Assumption: You have little to zero knowledge of Ruby or Rails

TL;DR: If you can’t make it through this document, just go straight to the rails tutorial.

Rails is built atop the Ruby programming language. It heavily features the concept of “Convention over Configuration.” This results in many things for newcomers to Rails:

• A steeper learning curve because things happen without the programmer explicitly causing them to.
• An appearance of magic for the same reason.
• A reaction to override many of the conventions because they may be foreign.
• A preponderance of bad code in an attempt to override the conventions.

My advice: Embrace the constraints and live with the enhanced productivity.

That said, I suggest you start with the Ruby programming language. It is a dynamically-typed, interpreted language that is said to be “optimized for programmer happiness.”

• http://tryruby.org/ (live, in-the-browser tutorial)
• http://railsapi.com/doc/ruby-v1.9.2/ (reference)
• http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ruby_Programming
• http://apidock.com/ruby

Once you’ve gotten the hang of Ruby syntax and seen some of its cool features (mixins, statement modifiers, crazy-simple reflection, etc), you’ll want to start learning Rails.

Rails is an MVC framework built on Ruby that provides a powerful engine for generating web applications. In its latest version 3 incarnation, Rails is highly modular, allowing developers to swap out testing frameworks, database adapters, and even template engines.

For awhile, the canonical book to learn Rails was Advanced Web Development with Rails (colloquially, AWDWR). While still effective, some newer resources have eclipsed it:

• http://railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book (tutorial that starts with SCM and deployment [which is freaking awesome])
• http://railsforzombies.org/ (a newcomer to the resource list from some Rails veterans)
• http://guides.rubyonrails.org/ (the official guides)
• http://railscasts.com/ (be careful not to go back too far... some of the old episodes are now very out-of-date)
• http://apidock.com/rails
• http://railsapi.com/doc/rails-v3.0.1/