Maybe this isn't written down clearly everywhere but it should be. If you're new to ruby ALL you need to know is that everyone in production runs:
Rails 2 (currently at 2.3.8)
Ruby 1.8.7 or REE (which are 100% compatible, since REE is only slightly different)
MySQL or PostgreSQL + Memcached
That's the boring, vanilla, stack 90% of production sites run. That's why it's pretty much the only stack Heroku and Engineyard support. If you have special needs (Java interop, more performance, NoSQL, Async IO) then yeah, do your research. If you just want to write a regular plain RoR app like 90% of people the above advice will suit you fine.
You're right, it's not hard. However I have a challenge: Find me a website that says exactly that, comes up first in Google, and is promoted by other Rails sites.
You're right about that. But people shouldn't be learning rails from online tutorials, they should be reading Active Web Development with Rails which has clear instructions.
Learning new languages from random online tutorials is always going to be confusing because stuff on the net is either too cutting edge or too disorganized, no matter what language you're using (yes, even PHP).
I've got like 5 different tutorials over the web that say otherwise. More importantly, any Rails book is going to be out of date in less than 3 months.
Rails 2 (currently at 2.3.8) Ruby 1.8.7 or REE (which are 100% compatible, since REE is only slightly different) MySQL or PostgreSQL + Memcached
That's the boring, vanilla, stack 90% of production sites run. That's why it's pretty much the only stack Heroku and Engineyard support. If you have special needs (Java interop, more performance, NoSQL, Async IO) then yeah, do your research. If you just want to write a regular plain RoR app like 90% of people the above advice will suit you fine.
You can have a full ruby environment with:
apt-get install ruby-full mysql-server
gem install rails
gem install mysql
Now, how hard was that?