Reddit reviews Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby)

Well firstly, language is a big choice right now. If you're looking to make a financially fulfilling career in a young company or on your own, I'd recommend learning javascript to later use node.js, and learning ruby. Personally, I'm a node.js developer, so I would recommend moving toward the JS world and using really cool things like socket.io and mongoDB. Ruby is a fantastic language overall. It's a bit slow, but it does a great job regardless, and tons of really cool startups use it. At the moment, I would say that these are the two most profitable paths to take in web development.

http://codeacademy.com is a fantastic place to start. It does a great job at teaching the fundamentals of programming. If I recall correctly, the javascript courses take you from the absolute basics to building some kind of useful application, such as a calculator or todo list.

Once you've made your way through the tutorials at codeacademy, move on to http://codeschool.com. Their tutorials are a bit more advanced, and leave you with a real application and real knowledge on how to take an idea and turn it into a real product. For node magic after you've moved through Codeschool, check out http://nodeschool.io/

Here are a few books I would recommend

JAVASCRIPT

• Javascript: The Good Parts
  
• Node.js in Action
  
  RUBY
  
  
• Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby
  
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial

This book is a pretty good tutorial for learning the basics of how to use Rails.