I second the thought on getting Agile Web Development with Rails. Best damn book I've ever bought concerning Rails. It is true that there is code specific for Rails(which kinda peeves me from my comfortable Ruby shell) but I highly recommend you learn Ruby first just to get the feel of programming in it. I must say coming from Java(ugh) programming is Ruby is such a pleasure. As long as you can think idiomatically then you're pretty much set!