I found this excellent tutorial on learning Ruby: Learn to Program, by Chris Pine. It makes Ruby look relatively easy to learn, although I’m beginning to wonder in what ways it’s easier than, say, Python. And since there’s the massive ‘pickaxe’ book I’m guessing there’s an awful lot more to Ruby, never mind Ruby on Rails.
There are also some weird quirks – well they seem like weird quirks from the point of view of other languages. For example @foobar means foobar is an instance variable. I suppose this is like saying this.foobar. But confusingly Ruby also has a ‘self’ keyword which acts like ‘this’ (and @). Hmmmm well maybe I need to check out the pickaxe after all…