Start with Learn To Program 2nd edition as it will get you familiar with programming concepts. (I worked halfway through this book before I realized I understood most all of it) http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Second-Facets-Ruby/dp/19...
Next I feel Beginning Ruby is a good place to get in depth with Ruby (I'm still getting into this book) http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-Professional-Sec...
Last is Simply Rails 2 which is one big long Rails tutorial and will take you through the process of building a Rails app (it took me about two weekends to work through and has given me rudimentary understand of Rails) http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Rails-2-Patrick-Lenz/dp/0980455...
In addition, as other people have recommended you should try small programming exercises when you have a chance. For further brain teasers, I recommend working through the exercises in http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
Well there's a specific lesson plan that I think is geared towards your business goals. I'm not sure what your time constraints are like but if you spend some uninterrupted time with these books you should be able to tackle them no problem.
Anyhow, good luck, I hope you find the time amongst everything else to dive into this material.
PS Programming is a lifelong project, give it time.
One thing I would suggest, it really provided the "aha" moment for me, is finding something that will dump out or print our your datastructures. If you don't understand what a hash is, and there's a tool in language (x) that will spew out what's in there, you will probably very quickly "get" what it is.
Do you have any friends that are developers? People generally enjoy when someone takes a genuine interest in their field. Perhaps ask politely if any of them would mind occasional IMs as you work your way through things.
Hit or miss, at times, but being able to chat live with real Ruby and Rails programmers is pretty helpful.
http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans
They are simple exercises that you can work through without prior knowledge, its a fast and fun way to get your feet wet. Then its important to read some books and get a good foundation under those wet feet, but we all know books can be boring, try to find one that has an actual project you work on throughout, seeing concepts come to life in front of you can be really helpful.
Then try to look at some code, since you are using rails I would highly suggest railscasts ( http://railscasts.com/ ) they are short videos, but there are 188 as of this writing that show some cool stuff about rails and get you in the hacker mindset.