It's not perfect, but it does walk you through the process of setting up a proper environment, using git for version control, and pushing to Heroku for rapid deployment. He even explains different basics and features of the Ruby language, so you can start here without learning Ruby if you so desire. Definitely complete the additional tasks at the end of each chapter as they are very helpful.
Also, I found it helpful to browse through the many open-source Rails projects you can find online, particularly on github.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1088737
Also, although I've only skimmed mhartl's book, it looks great and has already been updated for Rails 3: http://railstutorial.org/book
And for the edge rails guides (Rails 3): http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/
Have you considered Python/Django?
Indeed.com shows no such drop in Rails job offers. Both Rails and Django are showing growth in the percentage of job offers: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rails,+django&l=
If you fall back to a language-only search, then Python shows a bigger slice of the pie, but the original question was about web frameworks. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python,+ruby&l=