I'm just gonna come in and say that Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial (available free online here) helped me a ton. It's best if you know a little Ruby first (even just the Codecademy Ruby tutorial will help, but Codecademy's Rails tutorial is a bit lacking), but Hartl's book takes you through setting up free browser IDEs and Heroku/git repository resources, so that at the end, you can launch a functional project.

Highly recommend it for people that know a little bit of scripting, but have never launched a real project.