I also recently learned Rails and Ruby. I’ll share my experience.
In the beginning I started with Windows. I never had extensive experience with Linux. I used the Rails Installer and, generally speaking, everything worked as expected. It was, however, painfully slow. I have a powerful machine, which made no difference.
Using the generators, running tests, etc… generally speaking, most things that ran on the command line would do so at a slow speed. It’s manageable, but it becomes quickly painful, especially if you plan to do test driven development.
If your environment is Windows, try it out and see how it feels. If it starts to hurt, switch to Linux like I have.
Another advantage to using Linux besides speed is a decent terminal. The windows one is awful. Console 2 goes some way to help, but still falls short of what’s available on Linux.
I have been using
http://www.railsinstaller.org/ to install all of the necessary components on my Windows 7 machine. There are some minor differences between developing on Windows, and Mac/Linux. For me the biggest difference is the command line, and support for some gems.
Developing on Windows has come a long way in the past year, and I’m sure it will continue to improve.
Jeff, maybe some other folks have had better luck with windows, but I
did not. I switched to Fedora 16 on an old laptop and have been very
happy.
RVM is a Godsend. And I can tell you every rails person I know says
embrace the command line. Get Vim for an editor, etc.
Lynda.com has some a pretty good video series, but only through Rails
3.0.1
If you want to find out how to do cool things I would totally
recommend Ryan Bates site: RailsCasts.com
But read some rails books or do the Lynda.com thing first, you will
get more out of it that way.