I am a rails developer and as jtwenting said earilier in this thread, it is important to have a decent grasp of ruby before trying to get your head around rails.
I did a fair amount of python at uni and found ruby quite similar. The pragramatic programmers books also definately helped but the best way of learning imho is to try to make something.
rubyquiz has a list of problems that will challenge you; pick one - spend 10-20 minutes thinking about how you'll solve it (i usually scribble down diagrams/psuedocode etc on a pad) and have a go.
If you get stuck use the ruby book, ruby's api documentation, google, koders.com, ruby lists, irc etc.
You'll find with one or two under your belt it gets easier and the amount of time you spend thinking about ruby decreases and the amount of time you spend thinking about the problem increases (the way it should be!).
You will find the rails framework makes a LOT more sense if you understand ruby and you will be a lot more productive from the start.
Another thing that kind of goes without saying is choose a decent environment/editor to work with; you want something that at least has syntax highlighting.