A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write
- Ada like syntax
- Exception handling (like java or python)
- You can redefine ruby syntax
You can read more features here: http://www2.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html
Railsis a mvc framework for web architecture . The architecture became very simple for me because I already has around 3 years of experience in symfony framework programming. But ruby seems more powerful when it stick on with rails as ROR .
For windows users, download ror (ruby on rails) from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167
For linux users : http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p286.tar.gz
The getting started page of rubyonrails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/down) shows that you have to install ruby and gem separately. That is wrong. The gem modules are already included with the ruby package . So if you continues with ruby setup.rb as per the official site, you will get some errors.
You can simple install rails using gem. Gem is just like PEAR in php .
gem install rails
For those who are interested in ruby on rails programming, you can download full tutorial package include ruby and ruby on rails with a lots of example formhttp://www.mininova.org/tor/1269847
This package ,“Ruby Programming Ebooks 2008″ , containsa lots of tutorial + Agile Web Development with Rails, The Pragmatic Programers (2nd, 2007).pdf book , Rails Cookbook, O’Reilly (2007).chm(totally around 48 e-books)
(Remember it is a torrent, i don’t know about the copyright violation issue, i got it while searching on google)
Then start ROR today itself. Remember this post is only for programmers. For others forgot it, and it is not thesexy ruby standing on the rails 
Sajith