I'm looking to teach myself a new Web Dev language and have landed on Ruby/Rails. What are the best resources out there for learning Ruby/Rails if you are already a programmer with web experience?
Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails tutorial is a good start (look closely, there is free access online):<p><a href="http://railstutorial.org/" rel="nofollow">http://railstutorial.org/</a><p>It's not perfect, but it does walk you through the process of setting up a proper environment, using git for version control, and pushing to Heroku for rapid deployment. He even explains different basics and features of the Ruby language, so you can start here without learning Ruby if you so desire. Definitely complete the additional tasks at the end of each chapter as they are very helpful.<p>Also, I found it helpful to browse through the many open-source Rails projects you can find online, particularly on github.
If you'd like to learn from a book, Agile Web Development with Rails is nice. <a href="http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with-rails-third-edition" rel="nofollow">http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with...</a>
Here's my big list from a few months ago:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088737" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088737</a><p>Also, although I've only skimmed mhartl's book, it looks great and has already been updated for Rails 3: <a href="http://railstutorial.org/book" rel="nofollow">http://railstutorial.org/book</a><p>And for the edge rails guides (Rails 3): <a href="http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/" rel="nofollow">http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/</a>
I highly recommend <a href="http://railscasts.com" rel="nofollow">http://railscasts.com</a> if you haven't found it already. Great stuff ranging from beginner to pretty advanced.
Not sure why you'd want to learn Ruby/Rails. Ruby has been dropping in use for a few years now, and it looks like that downward trend will accelerate.<p>Have you considered Python/Django?