Micheal's Rails Tutorial was my first step in to Rails. I took Micheal's suggestion in the tutorial and spent a few days getting the basics of Ruby.

What Micheal focuses on is teaching you a few things he considers essential to the Rails ecosystem - git, Heroku and RSpec ( He mention the Test::Unit alternative too). I have learnt a lot from his tutorial and this is where I point others new to Rails to go to.

Also, it is better to get acquainted with git while working on a (dummy) project than trying its commands in a vacuum where one doesn't understand its power.