Starting Ruby On Rails: What I Wish I Knew

My rails (not ruby) experience: The deeper you go the more muddled you are; or better: At the end the ratio of rails and your own or third party code is 1:100

The only helpful thing in rails is ActiveRecord, you can also use separately. Distressful is that ruby and rails are by many people considered as the same thing. Those ROR versus PHP versus Java versus whatever-you-want are simply infantile. Please no flame and good luck :)

It's funny how the article uses parenthesis and brackets as examples of unneccessary 'cruft' that muddles your program's readability, yet to explain a common 'Rails-ism' the author re-introduces both of them into the sample code to make it more readable.

I'd like to add that Netbeans 6 M9 with Ruby support is the best Windows / Linux IDE I've found so far.

Edit: Link: http://dlc.sun.com/netbeans/download/6.0/milestones/latest/

These are all very valid points, although when I started I didn't have much trouble picking them up quickly. Still, a good resouce for beginners.