Stefan Wintermeyer wrote:Don't let people fool you into believing that Ruby on Rails is easly to learn. It is not! It is probably the best and most effective Framework to develop webapplications but it is hard to understand in the beginning. The worst mistake of all is to not learn Ruby before diving into Ruby on Rails. I made this one myself. This book starts with the basics of Ruby (Chapter 2, Ruby Basics). You will not become a Ruby guru after reading it but you'll understand the basic ideas and that is important.

The book is written in a way that you can and actually should read it from the first to the last page. But is is also written like a cookbook with a lot of photos of the process. The photos are of course not photos but code examples. Anyhow each recipe works for it self. Once you understand the concept of cooking you don't have to start with the first recipe. You can dive into baking a cheesecake right away.