Start by developing your rails apps locally on your machine, learn
Rails first, and worry about deployment later. You can run script/
server from your rails app directory to start a local webserver on
localhost:3000. Once you've developed your app, you can think about
deployment, and that's a question for your hosting provider.
By the way, Ajax on Rails assumes you understand Rails basics already,
so you might want to pick up something else if you are really new to
Rails, and then use Ajax on Rails to get good at the Ajax part.
The two canonical references are Programming Ruby and Agile Web
Development with Rails, both by Dave Thomas. I always keep these
handy when I'm programming in Rails just for the reference sections.
There's really no need to learn Ruby first. Learning both at the same
time is great, especially because Rails showcases many advanced
features of Ruby. As a computer scientist, my recommendation would be
Ruby for Rails by David Black which goes into detail on a lot of Ruby
specifics that are different from other languages without too much
basic programming filler. Ruby syntax is pretty straightforward, but
it's the dynamic bits that really set it apart from language like Java
and PHP. The discussion of Modules and Classes, for instance, was
worth the price of the book by itself. This is critical with Ruby
because code can be defined in any number of places and mixed in--if
you don't understand those mechanisms, much of Rails will remain a
black box, and that is a bad place to be when you run into a deep bug.
I haven't seen the Wrox book myself, but I heard such a scathingly bad
review of it that I'd be hard pressed to recommend it. Hampton Catlin,
who obviously knows a thing or two about RoR, says it's the worst ruby/
rails book:
