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Since its debut in 2004, Ruby on Rails has rapidly become one of the most powerful and popular frameworks for building dynamic web applications. Rails users run the gamut from scrappy startups to huge companies: Posterous, UserVoice, 37signals, Shopify, Scribd, Twitter, Hulu, the Yellow Pages—the list of sites using Rails goes on and on. There are also many web development shops that specialize in Rails, such as ENTP, thoughtbot, Pivotal Labs, and Hashrocket, plus innumerable independent consultants, trainers, and contractors.

What makes Rails so great? Rails owes much of its success to its elegant and compact design. By exploiting the malleability of the underlying Ruby language, Rails effectively creates a domain-specific language for writing web applications. As a result, many common web programming tasks—such as generating HTML, making data models, and routing URLs—are easy with Rails, and the resulting application code is concise and readable.

Rails also adapts rapidly to new developments in web technology and framework design. For example, Rails was one of the first frameworks to fully digest and implement the REST architectural style for structuring web applications (which we’ll be learning about throughout this tutorial). And when other frameworks develop successful new techniques, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson and the Rails core team don’t hesitate to incorporate their ideas. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the merger of Rails and Merb, a rival Ruby web framework, so that Rails now benefits from Merb’s modular design, stable API, and improved performance.³ (Anyone who has attended a talk by Merb developer and Rails core team member Yehuda Katz can’t help but notice what an extremely good idea it was to bring the Merb team on board.)

Finally, Rails benefits from an unusually enthusiastic and diverse community. The results include well-attended conferences, a huge number of plugins and gems (self-contained solutions to specific problems such as pagination or image upload), a rich variety of informative blogs, and a cornucopia of discussion forums and IRC channels. The large number of Rails programmers also makes it easier to handle the inevitable application errors: the “Google the error message” algorithm nearly always produces a relevant blog post or discussion-forum thread.

There's a lot information about Rails, but sometimes it's difficult to find information about how start learning this powerful framework.

This book-site is one of the best for learning Rails by examples and a way to start learning GIT, Rspec, and other tools that can make your life easy.

I didn't finish read this book, but i learned the basics concepts about how Rails works, and how can i develop a simple website (with autentication). The book is still on writing process and his author is Michael Hartl, you can stay tunned to the updates.