You'll get better working out and experimenting with things on your own, but Hartl's book serves as a great beginner's guide (while being comprehensive).
I think "The Rails Way" by Obie Fernandez works as a good reference book after you get more experienced as well.
The error you get when you try to push to Heroku isn't one that suggest that Heroku is down. Took me a while to figure that Heroku is down (after many futile attempts I decided to try to create a new app instead but they this time said that the api wasn't available)
I'm pretty sure karma means nothing to many including myself. Good karma - so what?
Just trying to help those who are facing the same problem as me, hoping they'd read this and realise that the issue isn't with their app or development machine but with Heroku.
You could take a look at the following a my friend and I (new to Rails) built using Ruby on Rails: http://supernotes.herokuapp.com/ for our school friends in a few days. It's still quite bare, with little JS or AJAX but that's because we're studying for our exams now.
I might have to learn the ruby first too. Seems quite key when i want to build my custom .html.erb pages.
Obie sent me the print version of his book, I'll probably take a look at it. Though in his email he considered it to be "more of an intermediate book".
I'd second this, but it's difficult to follow it without the screencasts, that has to be purchased. I've been trying to follow the web version of this though. Not too bad.
Was learning on version rails 3.1, but now that rails 3.2.5 is out too many things have changed.
For now since I'm just working on a RoR app as a personal project, I don't really have a server and tmux's capabilities are limited on my end. So I might give tmux a go first and familiarise with it first, so i'd be more up to speed when it's capabilities can come to play fully :D
I've tried doing it(amidst my school exams) but I think it doesn't quite drill into me best practices.
I don't want to explore go and hack up something; I want to learn it once and learn it right. Any recommendation for this? (: