Ok, so I bit the bullet and bought the Agile Web Dev book that some people suggested here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101571 - thanks for that by the way!). It's a really well written book (so far), but uses Rails 1.8, not Rails 2. Is there actually any benefit to using 2 over 1.8?
Plenty of benefits; improved support for REST is a major one, but there are tons of little fixes that make life much easier. The link in chaostheory's comment is a good overview, or (if you feel like spending $9 more) you can buy Ryan Daigle's Rails 2 PDF at <a href="http://peepcode.com/products/rails2-pdf" rel="nofollow">http://peepcode.com/products/rails2-pdf</a> - Daigle runs a well-respected blog that keeps track of the newest developments in edge, so was able to pick out the most important things to write about.
I think you might be confused between Ruby and Rails.<p>Ruby's current version is 1.8.6, while 1.9 is nearing an official release and 2.0 is still very experimental at this point.<p>Rails' current version is 2.0.2, but the last release on the 1.x branch was 1.2.6.<p>I'm going to assume that you meant Rails 1.2.x versus Rails 2.x. Yes, there are a lot of advantages. Mainly though, there aren't really any disadvantages- there's no reason <i>not</i> to use Rails 2.0.
yes besides bug fixes there are performance improvements - db caching, new features (in production all separate css files are combined automatically into one), and so on<p><a href="http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done" rel="nofollow">http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done</a>