I love Haml/Sass/Compass for HTML and CSS. It is tightly integrated with Rails and saves much time. (I never want to write HTML tags again!) I disagree on the

I love Haml/Sass/Compass for HTML and CSS. It is tightly integrated with Rails and saves much time. (I never want to write HTML tags again!) I disagree on the use of presentational/semantic styles, however. These are not that useful once your design is stable, but the beauty of Sass is that you can use them early, then move your grids into specific selectors later for cleaner, better organized code. You can do both! Compass is awesome for color palettes, too. It includes several cool functions for adjusting colors. JavaScript is a completely different story. You should really dig into books, etc., and build a solid understanding of how JS works before adopting any library like jQuery. It will save you a lot of hassle building and maintaining your code. D. Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts is a common recommendation. jQuery Fundamentals is a free HTML book that provides a good start if your going the jQuery direction.