I'm one of the authors of the book.
You don't need to know any RoR. There are a couple chapters where we use some Ruby (Jekyll and Cucubmer-driven Selenium Testing), but we walk you through getting things set up properly if you want to use them.
You don't need to know any RoR. There are a couple chapters where we use some Ruby (Jekyll and Cucubmer-driven Selenium Testing), but we walk you through getting things set up properly if you want to use them.
[OT question that has blocked this PHP-hobbyist from dabbling in RoR: do professionals ever add a new functionality as part of a web app via RoR when the bulk of project has already been built with something like PHP? (looking for motivation to start some experimentation in Ruby)]
There's not a lot of server-side code in the book, to be honest. Chapters like Creating a Widget focus on the client-side code - loading content in to your page and providing an example for what the data looks like, without getting in to "here's how you'd' do this in Ruby or PHP or .NET".
But we really wanted to keep the server-side stuff to a minimum, and while we all use Rails, it's not the answer to all web development - especially with things moving more client-side.
Your second question, yes you certainly can. I've done it and the only tricky part is making them work together, and thanks to web services, that's not terrible. I even have a new Rails app consuming some XML I wrote with classic ASP.
The core of the project I'm working on is built in PHP. However, we found that there were a few things that would make more sense in RoR, and there are many features in the future that will be better served as RoR apps. Basically, we are using mod_proxy to redirect to the Rails app.
If you'd like to talk more about it, I'd be more than happy.