I would highly recommend learning Ruby before trying RoR. The first time I tried to learn RoR I didn't know any Ruby. I had limited success because I had to battle the framework and the language.
You don't need to know everything about Ruby to start on RoR, but you should be able to write some basic programs.
For RoR guides online, I didn't find anything that I really liked. I ended up with Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2.0 and followed it. I didn't find any free guides/books that really helped me much. Once you get a basic understanding of MVC you can learn a lot of from http://railscasts.com though.
I would highly recommend learning Ruby before trying RoR. The first time I tried to learn RoR I didn't know any Ruby. I had limited success because I had to battle the framework and the language.
You don't need to know everything about Ruby to start on RoR, but you should be able to write some basic programs.
There are a number of online resources for Ruby:
Unofficial and old, but has a lot of good info: http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/ruby/0.3/
http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/UsersGuide/rg/
http://qa.poignantguide.net/index.html
For RoR guides online, I didn't find anything that I really liked. I ended up with Sitepoint's Simply Rails 2.0 and followed it. I didn't find any free guides/books that really helped me much. Once you get a basic understanding of MVC you can learn a lot of from http://railscasts.com though.
PS: Sorry to everyone for the RoR/Ruby hijack
EDIT: Wrote a sentence misleadingly, fixed it.