I would suggest you use as little non-RoR baggage as possible when starting out. An editor that does auto indent and context color highlighting is nice, if you’re already comfortable with it. Also avoid rvm initially, and git, and any db other than sqlite. All these items have there own learning curve that will just confuse you - it’s hard to discriminate the true source of an error if you have too many poorly understood layers between you and your code.
Make an extra effort to learn on a Mac or Ubuntu system. Do not use windoze, it’s like touching the third rail in the subway or licking the metal pole in the winter. If you haven’t yet gotten comfortable with unix, this is the only complex tool you need to put between yourself and RoR.
The hardest part for me was (and continues to be) debugging. Particularly difficult are errors that occur during application startup as these are just as likely to come from your run time environment as your code and are not always well described.
Follow the rails tutorial, get comfortable with the architecture by building small projects. Remeber that many people have run through the tutorial so it’s unlikely to include errors. If it does include errors google “rails tutorial your error message” and you will find a thread. I think the Dave Thomas book “Programming Ruby” is among my best purchases, my copies are all dogeared from continued use.
I personally use emacs with the rinari package but I’ve been using emacs since 1980 so the learning curve is not an issue. It’s nice to have an editor that you can carry across platforms.