What is the best way to learn rails 3.0 with no prior rails or ruby experience? I'm just curious about it and want to get started.
Do I start with 3.0 or 2.0?
If one is a very good OO developer and knows Java and Scala really well, would it be hard to get by with rails without knowing much ruby? (basically learning book at the same time).
Any good books that do a fantastic and thorough job at not really explaining how an MVC works but how everything works in rails specifically? Something that doesn't just look at "the most basic case", but really gets in there above a basic CRUD app.
I was flipping through a book about rails 2.0 at Chapters and the first 20 pages kept giving a sales pitch about how easy rails is, and yadda yadda. It tended to rip on java a lot... but since I know Java really well, I thought the author didn't know what he was talking about. His comparisons and examples of Java were biased... either comparing it to the language itself or to frameworks that I wouldn't even consider using because they suck (struts, etc.). I think his goal was to make it look worse than it really was. Spring 3.0, while not ideal, isn't nearly as bad as the author was letting on... and I guess I lost confidence in the author because he didn't even bother to mention Spring.
Anyway, any advice to some lean yet informative and intelligent books would be helpful. I thought the Scala book written by Martin and crew was fantastic, so if a book exists at that caliber, I'm very open to reading it.
Thanks