Getting a good grasp of RVM is the most important tool in this respect. It serves a similar purpose to virtualenv and in some respects pip because it also integrates rubygems.

It also helps to have a decent grasp of git, you'll be using it a lot for installing things and getting resources from the community. Other than that, it's all personal opinion and you'll work out something that works for you soon enough.

I recommend railstutorial.org as the first and most important stop for Rails learning anyway, so you should try following his instructions for setting up an environment:

http://railstutorial.org/book#sec:rubygems

In terms of getting your app in front of the public quickly and easily, you can't look past Heroku. It has an awesome free account and you won't need to start paying until you want to either a) increase your traffic, or b) run background tasks (such as scheduled bulk emails or something like that)