[gurkendoktor]

I don't think Railscasts is a great introduction to Rails, but certainly a resource that beginners can use. What I did was to work my way through the first parts of "Agile Web Development with Rails" to understand the structure of rails, then just try to build stuff.

Whenever I had a question or felt somebody should have automated whatever I was doing, I would search Railscasts. I needed PDF generation, so I would search for PDF and compare my options.

When you have some experience with current Rails (say, 3.1), actively following new Railscasts is interesting to see what changed in 3.2, 3.3, 4.0, ...