神奇的决定!在学习Rails之前，先了解Ruby是非常有用的，所以下面是我对学习Rails的最佳途径的看法:

Learn to Program by Chris Pine - You can read this in an afternoon to get a feel for the Ruby language. The Well Grounded Rubyist by David Black - Like the title says it will give you an excellent grounding in the language. Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen - This book is sublime, it reads like a novel. Ruby Best Practices by Gregory Brown - By this point you should be ready for the advanced level of this book. Rails for Zombies - Fun tutorial you can complete in an afternoon. Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl - Fantastic (and free) tutorial and I have heard his accompanying screencasts are amazing. Agile Web Development with Rails by Sam Ruby - By the time you are finished this you are now a completely capable Rails person!

除了书本之外，最重要的是获得对你所做事情的反馈。要做到这一点，我建议花时间在irc.freenode.net #ruby和#rubyonrails。在stackoverflow上发布你正在做的事情或遇到的麻烦也是非常有用的，因为人们提供的评论、解释和不同的思考方式是非常宝贵的。

你也一定要看看Ruby Rogues播客，他们提供了宝贵的信息，评论员都是Ruby社区里非常受人尊敬的人。为了让你的观看和阅读乐趣(按此顺序)，请前往瑞恩·贝茨的《Railscasts》和艾菲恩·贝德福德的《Asciicasts》。

最后，我建议在github上寻找不同的宝石，阅读代码，然后为它们做出贡献。你不必过于雄心勃勃，做大量的重新编码，尤其是在刚开始的时候。只要从一些小事情开始，比如编辑和使README文件更容易阅读。

我不使用IDE，但在Railsconf上我看到了Jetbrains的Rubymine演示，它看起来非常棒。

I have got up to speed with Ruby on Rails fairly quickly via this free online course which is currently being offered by UC Berkeley - Software as a Service - Engineering Long Lasting Software with instruction by Armando Fox and David Patterson. I can't speak highly enough of this course... it really was a privilege to learn Rails from these guys. And there is an active community on the course forums if you run into difficulty along the way. The first offering of the online course has now finished (as of 25 March, 2012) - the next time it will be run will be sometime in September of 2012.

It assumes you are a fairly competent developer and gets you started on ruby in the second week, then Rails runs from the third week up to the end of the course (five weeks). Your assignments are marked by an auto-grader. You get provided with a pre-built Ubuntu VM image with everything you need for development pre-installed on it (e.g. Ruby, Rails, Rake, Gems, RSPec, Cucumber, etc). All you have to do is start up the VM inside the (free) VirtualBox software which runs on MacOSX, Windows and Linux.

这门课有一本推荐教材。在这里……但是你可以在网上看讲座和视频。

阻力最小的路径:

Have a simple web project in mind. Go to rubyonrails.org and look at their "Blog in 15 minutes" screencast to get excited. Get a copy of O'Reilly Media's Learning Ruby Get a Mac or Linux box. (Fewer early Rails frustrations due to the fact that Rails is generally developed on these.) Get a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails. Get the version of Ruby and Rails described in that book. Run through that book's first section to get a feel for what it's like. Go to railscasts.com and view at the earliest videos for a closer look. Buy The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez to get a deeper understanding of Rails and what it's doing. Then upgrade to the newest production version of Rails, and view the latest railscasts.com videos.

《敏捷开发与Rails》一书是最好的教学工具。它有一个很好的类似于生活的应用程序，它通过章节向你介绍不同的概念。我使用了两次示例，之后我有了足够的知识来做自己的事情，并依赖于rails API文档(http://api.rubyonrails.org/)。

http://www.teachmetocode.com是学习Ruby和Ruby on Rails的绝佳来源。这里有一些介绍Rails基础知识的屏幕视频，还有一个由6部分组成的系列，介绍如何使用Ruby on Rails创建Twitter克隆版。

http://railsforzombies.org/是一个不错的网站。介绍了一种在浏览器中学习Ruby on Rails的全新方法，无需额外配置。