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If you're going down the rails path, start with this free and great intro tutorial/book: http://railstutorial.org/chapters/

Thanks! This looks great, really comprehensive.

It should be noted that it not only gets you going with Rails, but also instills some great practices from the beginning - like test driven development. Get started and you'll have your own little twitter deployed in just a couple of days! ;-)

I agree with this especially if you're trying to get jobs.

You will inevitably have to learn some javascript at some point though so you might also want to look at node.js (awesome but not as many jobs yet).

Agreed. These are good places to start because you can just start building and learn as you go. Once you start building, you'll figure out what you need to be reading very quickly.

Of the two, does it matter which one I start with, or are both equally suitable for an absolute beginner?

It does not matter. Both are suitable for beginners and have widespread support within the programming community. I can add "php" to the list, which also falls on the same level in terms of resources available on the net.