This book is one of the three in plus's comment; another one his comment mentions is "Ruby for Rails", which will get you up to speed on Ruby as a language. It's a great book; get it too.

Check out www.PeepCode.com. Best bang for $9 you can find. You'll probably find these most interesting to begin with:

* https://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-i

* https://peepcode.com/products/rails-from-scratch-part-ii

* https://peepcode.com/products/restful-rails

Another great resource is www.railscasts.com.

"The Rails Way" is a good book but the online version requires Adobe Digital Editions for the DRM and that interface is a pig. This book is clearly not intended as a first book on Rails, but you'll end up buying it if you do more than one project. There's supposed to be a new version coming out soon, so check out the date of publication.

I started Rails as one project of many, but I don't think that pollutes my fundamental finding: Learn Ruby First. In fact I'd like to put together a book of small Ruby tasks and samples to cover the language. The existing books are narrative-based.

The secret question for all Rails developers is: Should I learn the framework by looking at the source? Or should I code by reading the API docs? I started out as an old-fashioned software-is-a-contract guy and tried to build code by following the docs. The docs aren't good enough. The site 'api.rubyonrails.org' has docs that include source, lacking only an on-screen search box.

Finally, a good IDE that indexes the rails source (and your source) to produce a sort of visual-etags would be very useful. I haven't found one I like. That is, I would like to click on my call to 'number_to_currency' and have it bring up the source code in another window frame. I haven't found a solution I like.

For total beginners, I recommend Sitepoint's Build Your Own Ruby on Rails book -- http://www.sitepoint.com/books/rails1/

Rails Way is great to fill out your Rails understanding from there, and then I recommend David Black's Ruby for Rails to fill out your Ruby understanding -- it will allow you to do so much more.

A quick look at a what's new in Rails 2.0 will get any rails noob up to speed. I stand by recommending the book, though caution people to make sure they do follow it with Rails 1.2.6 otherwise mass confusion will ensue.

That's not to knock rails at all though, I use it exclusively at this point for web stuff.

And the Poignant Guide http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

The only caveat is that it was written for Rails 1.2.3. The book's site is http://beginningrails.com/ and the author replies regularly to questions about the book (or Rails in general) over at http://groups.google.com/group/beginning-rails

The fastest way to learn is by actual coding - fight ennui and boredom by taking the tutorial code and building a toy application of interest to you.

for implementing full projects in rails 2.0 practical rails projects

for ruby, beginning ruby, ruby cookbook, The Ruby Programming Language

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is also decent. It uses the RESTful approach which is cool.