Although Why makes me think, sometimes I want a little more hand holding.
Rolling with Ruby on Rails provides all that, and by the end of the tutorials, I was thinking up reasons to write RoR applications.
If you're not comfortable with MySQL administration, you may want to work through the revised version: RwRoRR. by Bill Walton and Curt Hibbs. Some of the GUI MySQL software described in the original version is no longer available so I had to wing that part. The new version uses the MySQL console and a structure file to create the tables for the excersizes.
Not counting installing Ruby and MySQL, it took about 2 hours to get through the original tutorial. I should think the new version would go much faster. This is highly recommended for any programmer who wants to see a demonstration of RoR's potential.