Thanks for the comments.

The 4th beta came out just after I wrote this post. I’ve switched to the fourth beta for the next section.

I agree that a more extensive Ruby book is in order. However, I was also happy that there was enough Ruby (now) to get me through the Rails material in the first section.

The purpose of the book is to focus on the Rails framework – not Ruby per se. Several times in the book, Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas and David H. Hansson cite to the Picaxe Book and refer readers to that resource for a more in depth discussion of Ruby. I would also suggest that folks check out the Metaprogramming in Ruby book from the Prag Prog.

Not sure which version of the book you were going through. As of now, there have been 4 beta revisions of the book. The big change in 4th version, which is not that big of a change, the new key word was added. So..when you create a rails app:

rails new myappname. It should also be pointed out that

One other thing, folks probably want to stick with Ruby 1.8.7. I don’t believe the latest beta works with Ruby 1.9.1, but reports are, it works with 1.9.2. Per the release notes, there are still bugs and stability issues. Hence – sticking with 1.8.7 is probably a good idea.