I'm new to Ruby on Rails, but not to MVC web development, having cut my teeth on Turbogears, Django, etc.
I'm having trouble finding a piece of good intro documentation to Ruby on Rails -- either the tutorial is for RoR 1.x, or the tutorial is for RoR 2.1.x, but assumes that you already know how RoR works.
Does anyone know of a tutorial that covers RoR 2.1, from the perspective of a newcomer?
I've found Rails Recipes is a good guide on how to do stuff with RoR. The whole book is a big example of developing a retail app from start to finish. I learned a lot from it.
Oh, by the way, if you look carefully enough, there's someone who scanned the whole book and uploaded it.
You may be surprised that the materials on Rails 1.2 are still a good place to start. Though many things have changed between 1.2 and 2.1, the stuff written on 1.2 is still very helpful at showing the core activities involved in building a Rails app. Agile Web Development With Rails may be a little outdated, but it's still worth reading, if only to get the hang of the Rails philosophy. There is a Third Edition being written, and it'll likely be one of the definitive references on Rails 2.x. The authors are all extremely well-versed in Rails development, and include the original creator of Rails framework.
All that said, I think that the best materials currently out there on Rails 2.x are the Peepcode reference materials.
I recommend that you start with the two screencasts:
They do a great job of visually introducing you to Rails 2 development. Then, I'd recommend you pick up the Rails 2.1 PDF by Ryan Daigle, to get the hang of the 2.1 features not covered in the screencasts.
That should be enough for quite the kickstart, but you may find yourself looking for more advanced or reference material at that point. If you're not familiar with Ruby's advanced features like blocks, closures, and the like, you'll probably want The Pickaxe Book from Pragmatic Programmers.
Once you've got the hang or Ruby and the basic of Rails, the great books to get better, in my opinion, are:
Once you get a firm grounding, it's also a good idea to watch the Railscast Screencasts each week. They present a great 5-minute howto each week that helps to keep you sharp. There are currently over 100 to choose from.
If you try to follow the old tutorials, you'll likely run into many incompatibilities. I recently tried to scrownge up a tutorial for a collegue who wanted to learn and didn't find much, though here is a simple guide for 2.1.
An apparently very good site has popped up recently. Check out Ruby on Rails guides. I hear the quality is very good and the tutorials are up to date.
Check out the Railscasts. They are short (5-15 minutes) videos showing specific things you can do with Rails. If you start from #1, you probably will find stuff about 1.x, but Ryan keeps up with the latest production version. For example, if you wanna know why named scopes are so awesome, check out named_scope.
If you're looking for more of a reference book, in a few months, check out The Rails Way.
I have found the learning rails video podcast to be very helpful. They build a basic CMS from scratch. It starts out with audio (which is kind of boring) and on lesson 9 switches to screencasts. Lesson 10 is when it starts getting good.
I found RailsSpace to be an excellent introductory tutorial to Rails. Although it was written against 1.x, it is Rails 2.0 compatible.
Actually, I found Guides to be very useful once you cracked the surface. They are not too deep but not too shallow either.
Here's a place to start: http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/3398/ruby-programming-tutorial It's a list of tutorials that is pretty up to date, and maintained.