Anyone else partake of the precious stone?
I been hacking about in ruby for a while now. Absolutely love the community and the fact that just about any kind of library you can think of already exists (as a gem) and you just need to write the glue to mash gems together instead of writing everything from scratch.
I'm personally looking for the best means to learn from for Ruby/Rails programming, I love the work and framwork that it provides.
http://railscasts.com is one of the best sources I've found. Some of them are free they usually have text/code examples from the video so you don't need to watch the video. Although that is more for once you already have a rails app and you want to do stuff to it.
To start with rails I guess this guide would do: http://fuelyourcoding.com/creating-your-first-ruby-on-rails-application-from-scratch/ and this site is always a winner: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
The best source I've found for starting out was this book: http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails cost me $24 for a DRM free PDF and was well worth it. My friend actually gave me his copy but I ended up buying it for myself because it was awesome. They also have some other awesome looking books there but I am too poor/busy to get/read them.
I also cruise http://reddit.com/r/ruby and http://reddit.com/r/rails for hints and tips too.
There's also http://railsforzombies.com but I find it talks more about how to program in rails, and not setting up your rails app et al. Try ruby at http://tryruby.org is also a good one for learning the ruby basics.
I find myself doing a lot of work in ruby itself now where I used to do scripts in bash. It's so great as a scripting language and so easy to write code. The modules and requires system really helps you separate concerns in your code and split functionality up efficiently.
I fully recommend though, especially with rails apps where you have lots of dependencies that you run RVM (ruby version manager at http://rvm.io). You can create little bubbles (called gemsets e.g. 1.9.3@mycoolapp) that will run the version of ruby you specify and all you gem dependencies and everything for your app will remain in that little bubble. So if one your apps needs version 2.4 of the device gem and another one needs 2.2 they can both reside in their own gemsets and not disturb each other.
Once the guys get the new articles thing up and going I want to write some stuff on ruby.
Oh and if you're not using linux when you're doing ruby... I don't even wanna go there... (Linux on a Virtual Machine works mean though).
I'm currently working through a hard copy of this book https://www.railstutorial.org/ but they have it free to read online