Sorry if I am being a true noob, but I am very confused about what environment I should be using to learn RoR. I would like to eventually build something to deploy on google appengine. But am really just wanting at this point to learn Rails. But it seems that as I fumble about and try various tutorials that are available, I seem to be running to situations where I get some random error, when I google that error, the solutions is a mixed bag of either use a newer version of ruby or rails or some gem, and older version. Other then the (very nice) tutorials on http://guides.rubyonrails.org/, I have had very little luck with the available examples on the web. So my perception is that you really have to know where you will be deploying your application, and then figure out the sweet spot for versions and environments.
So my question is simply, if I want to learn RoR and perhaps eventually deploy something out to some hosting service then: 1) What OS to work in (Windows or Linux)? 2) Ruby or JRuby? 3) Version of Rails? 4) Do I have to worry about where I will be hosting and that services capability BEFORE I start development?