You're probably excited about learning rails - if so, just go ahead and jump into it. Like right now, don't worry about anything else. You'll soon realize the

You're probably excited about learning rails - if so, just go ahead and jump into it. Like right now, don't worry about anything else. You'll soon realize the value of not using Windows. A big part of learning as a newbie is to just try things out. Then you can understand in a very personal way why everyone on HN is telling you to develop on a linux VM (or Mac when you get it). You'll also find out that "learning Rails" as someone with zero programming experience really isn't about learning just Rails. It's going to be valuable to learn the command line, git, heroku, etc. A great resource for a complete newbie is the material from Coursera's "Startup Engineering" class. There's a lot of business-y stuff in it (e.g. market sizing) but you can just ignore that and follow the instructions they give for setting up a decent dev environment and all the tools you'll need to do basic work. The reason it's so great is that they really hold your hand through setting up a lot of the background "infrastructural" stuff that someone with zero programming experience might not be aware of.