1) I've used the Agile Ruby on Rails book along with the free Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby online. (Cartoon Foxes!) I suggest checking out Why's Guide first a

1) I've used the Agile Ruby on Rails book along with the free Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby online. (Cartoon Foxes!) I suggest checking out Why's Guide first and learn Ruby before you hit Rails. Ruby's a fairly easy language to learn while Rails is a totally different programming scheme you may be unfamiliar with (ActiveRecord). Look at CakePHP to get familiar with ActiveRecord for PHP. I don't really recommend CakePHP as a development platform, but it's a great way to understand Rails if Ruby+Rails at the same time is too complicated. 2) My opinion of why RoR has taken off is because ActiveRecord makes normal day-to-day activities simple. Verification is already handled. Although PHP and Ruby are roughly equal in speed (Ruby 2.0 is going to be a lot faster though!), Rails isn't. But once you're done, built-in caching features help it scale at least a little bit. Of course if you're worried about scalability, just program the whole thing in C. :P (That's what Amazon does!)