I've been thinking about trying Ruby on Rails for some time now but every time I look at it, it just seems so complicated and difficult to get started with. I'm a long time PHP user and I have zero experience with ruby with or without rails. I know the RoR people claim you'll develop 10x faster with rails but I cant even get started.
Is there a comprehensive quick start guide somewhere that will take you all the way from installing ruby, rails & pref an ide on windows to developing your first functional project (ie. not Hello World) Also covering topics such as security and session handling since all the RoR projects I've seen in the demos can (and have been) editted by anyone. The RoR wiki has been completely trashed by spammers.

I have started learning Ruby on Rails about 4 months ago...and found that learning the basics of the Ruby programming language essential in understanding some constructs such as Hashes, Arrays etc. and how they are implemented in Ruby.

Although the following tutorial is very basic...I think it is quite a nice introduction to programming Ruby.
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/

Also, I found this tutorial quite useful in understanding advanced concepts of Ruby...
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

As for a tutorial that demonstrates how to install Ruby on Rails and create a very simple application, I find the following tutorial to be very useful and introduces the concept of Model View Controller.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2.../20/rails.html

As for a text editor, I have been using JEdit....as I personally program in Java, JavaScript, PHP, etc and found a useful tutorial on how to customize JEdit for Rails.
http://www.eadz.co.nz/blog/article/r...ils-jedit.html

If you are interested in getting a video tutorial for Ruby on Rails. I recommend the following from Lynda. It covers all aspects of programming in Rails, including security, authentications, etc.
http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=324

I've just started learning Ruby on Rails and I wanted to add for those that are more familier with the Eclipse IDE there is a rather nice plugin for Ruby on Rails called RDT


RDT Link:http://www.aptana.com/products/radrails

(Sorry for the necro thread, was going through looking for a post like this and thought I'd contribute while also using some of ess' links)

also found this interesting site.
http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Database wrote:

also found this interesting site.
http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Wow, great find there. Probably the best interactive tutorial I've seen in a while.

hehe thanks, shame i didnt find out that this thread was way old before i read it and replied, still its a good share..

That's a great tutorial. Also look at those sites:

Creating a weblog in 15 minutes:
http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts

http://rubylearning.com/satishtalim/tutorial.html