Simple guide for getting started...http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

This will lead you to many other great on line guides.

In general, I am running MRI Ruby 1.8.7, Rails 2.3.5, MySQL 5.1

+1 for the Rails guides reference, they're quickly becoming the de-facto rails reference and are being maintained well.

re: Stack for production environments, these days almost everyone uses passenger+apache/nginx which uses ruby enterprise

Thanks for the help guys.

I also had another question: have you used the peepcode screencasts to learn about passenger + rails stuff? If so, how would you rate the screencasts? I used their git screencasts in the past, and they were terrific; just wanted to know how their rails stuff compares...

peepcode and railscasts are both great!