Ok, I've been wandering round the world of rails for a while now... here's some of the more interesting stuff I've found.
Places to Start
Well there's the obvious one... http://www.rubyonrails.com/ :o) There's some cool screencasts there which try to capture some of the reasons that rails is an interesting place to develp.
Also it's not a bad idea to look in on the blog of the guy who started it all David Heinmeier Hannson to get a sense of some of the ideas that he's looking to include in rails...
And if you're looking for reasons to spend some time on rails there's an interesing entry here about Sitepoints survey recently that 25% of SitePoints developers that aren't currently using Ruby expect to be in the next 12 months....
Ok, so you've decided to give it a shot... how to start... well there's some good tutorials on rails around, though unfortunately they get out of date pretty quickly due to the pace of change in the rails world..
Some of the one's that I liked
Rolling with Rails Good tutorial in 3 parts by Curt Hibbs, who's authored a rails book for O'reilly recently
Really getting started with Rails is kind of a complement to rolling with rails, and there's some other cool stuff in the form of cheatsheets and the like on Amy's site
If you're looking for more tutorial material there's a cool list here and also another more recent one from the competition that the ruby inside site ran here
Blogs and other websites for rails
One of the things I've found about rails is that the only really decent way to keep up to date is to keep an eye on the blogs which cover the topic.. Fortunately, there's loads of them...
(no particular order to this, apart from the order I added them to my blogroll) ;op
Ruby inside
Ryan's scraps
Riding Rails - the official Rails blog
Cardboard Rocket
The unofficial Ruby on Rails blog
I.NFECTIO.US
And there's more... but a good way to find 'em is just follow links in the one's above :O)
Books
What's considered the semial book on rails development is Agile Web Development with Rails from pragmatic programmers. I actually wasn't too fond of the style, as there wasnt' much in the way of excercise material in the tutorial, which I find helps re-inforce concepts with me... That said it's still a gold mine of info. on rails. One key point is that I wouldn't buy the 1st edition as the 2nd is under active development and you can get the PDF from the pragmatic programmers site.
Another book which is handy if you've not got a strong ruby background before starting with rails is Ruby for Rails which goes through a lot of the basics of ruby coding with an eye on rails...
One thing is that there are... a lot... of upcoming books for rails as it's pretty hot at the moment and there's a relative dearth of content... There's a good posting here Which covers some of the upcoming books
