Hartl's http://www.RailsTutorial.org/book http://www.RailsTutorial.org/book is excellent for all levels. Also look into http://www.tryruby.org http://www.tryrub

Hartl's http://www.RailsTutorial.org/book http://www.RailsTutorial.org/book is excellent for all levels. Also look into http://www.tryruby.org http://www.tryruby.org and consider using Sinatra if you really wanna jump in right away. Rails gets better with time in that it's really built for getting some common things done fast - so convention over configuration is the game here. Sinatra on the other hand is well, it lets you take the stage asap. Regardless, look into Hartl's book. Then, scourge gitHub for similar OSS projects to see how people think in Ruby. For your use case, look into social networks like LovdByLess and the book above implements a twitter clone, both great examples. Also, since you're new to this Rails business, you might as well consider Django or Pylons for a minute - it's likely possible you might even like python over ruby, but that doesn't really matter at the end of the day as long as you enjoy the framework, community and the libraries.