I happened across Code School’s “Rails for Zombies” today (I’d seen a link to “Try Git“, was impressed, and started poking around), and holy cow, it might actually stick now!

Three things about it:

1. Immediately they recommended going through “Try Ruby” if you didn’t already have familiarity with the language. That got me a taste of the syntax, which is pleasantly sane.
2. There isn’t any futzing about with setting up an environment. Where I got stuck (initially) was just in setting up the environment on my machine.
3. Lots of little bits of trial and error, following VERY short videos. With two monitors, I’ve got the slides open nearby so I can skim back and forth to see the exact syntax & whatnot. I’ve been doing all the extra credit just to get it to stick better.

So I’m optimistic.