[jpdbaugh]

I had a ton of the trouble learning rails and it actually took me a couple of attempts. The most affective thing for me was just starting a project and taking it slow trying to do everything the "rails way". Learning rails for me was a tremendously slow process but now it just makes sense and I can do things so much more quickly than I ever code with PHP. Rails is definitely easier to learn if you directly apply a guide to problem in my opinion, but maybe this is the case for all programming though.

More specifically, I have found railscasts and the official rails guides plus railsdoc to me infinitely useful. I usually look for a railscast to get the overview of the thing I want to use then look for a guide and then move into the rdoc for deeper understanding.