[Shank]

It's best to pick a project and try to build it, rather than learn things from the outside. In isolation, Ruby can be annoying to learn because it's syntactic sugar seems unnecessary. In context of an app, though, it's great. The sugar makes sense.

Rails has a bit of a learning curve, but that learning curve is well rationalized. To borrow a Steve Jobs-ism: you're starting on the 10th floor, when everyone else is starting on the 2nd floor. Out of the box, you get a killer asset pipeline and complete MVC system that's standardized and conventional.

You can throw together a well built webapp without cutting corners in a fraction of the time doing it by hand. Things like a solid REST API practically come free with Rails. That's really valuable.

[modernerd]

What are the best resources to learn Ruby/Rails these days?

[guu]

https://www.railstutorial.org/book is quite good

[mooreds]

This is what I used to jump from "I've hacked on a rails 3 app and gone through some ruby Katas" to "I am building out a full fledged SaaS product in a Rails 4 app as technical co-founder".

Highly recommended.

[Shank]

I, personally, just used the Rails docs, and watched DHH's introduction. The Rails guides are really good (the official guides, that is).

[webbrahmin]

Pick up rails book from pragmatic bookshelf. Give it a quick read. Then watch railscast videos. Then to rails doc and gorails.

[richjdsmith]

Another vote for Gorails. It's certainly the next step from beginner Rails dev to, well, not beginner.