Decaflon

I used Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development with Rails by The Pragmatic Programmers to teach myself Ruby and Rails. They are both pretty good books and it actually should be a bit easier for you to pick up a unique language like Ruby than most people since you don't have much development experience. What I mean is that if you came from a C/C++/C#/Java/PHP/any normal language background, Ruby can be difficult to pick up because it uses obscure syntax and structures.

Be warned: Reference material/API documentation for Ruby and Rails is extremely poor compared to other technologies.

you should not develop application with a framework of a programming language you're not familiar with.

I migrated to Ruby (and Rails) from PHP, but i started at the wrong end (began learning framework instead of language itself) and my Rails application's code was very PHP-ish. I suggest you study any language at first and then dive into it's frameworks.

Hey hey! I'm also a CF developer, and learning Rails has been a lot of fun so far. One useful thing I've been doing is going through the Agile Development with Rails book and working out everything I can, including the optional sections at the end of the chapter. The book is a walkthrough to building a real-world app by breaking it down to smaller parts.

The only problem is that Rails 1.2.4, the Rails 2 pre-release, was recently put out and there's a decent amount of changes from the book, so some things won't work straight off. The Ruby for Rails book is pretty good too after you've started making your way through Agil Development with Rails. It describes what code is Rails code and what is Ruby, as well as showing some examples of conventions used in Rails that are just Ruby conventions. Two good books for learning it!

Ruby for Rails is a -great- follow up to "Agile". As someone who hacks at Rails full time now, Ruby for Rails is essential to understand what happens underneath the magic.