You guys are lucky. I had a torturous time playing with RoR. I had a week to learn it in and just couldn't get a hang of all the automatic things it did being a guy who likes to know exactly why some thing works. Not surprising considering RoR is not just a different language but also a different way of describing what you are building. I resorted to Perl and had better luck.
I've been using RoR for over a year, professionally for about 7 months and my best advice (it's also been mentioned in other threads) is to learn Ruby first. If you get to know Ruby pretty well, it's much easier to see through the smoke and mirrors.
Agreed... The hardest thing is to cast of the PHPisms and Java patterns that you may be used to, a lot of Rails is idiomatic Ruby code, so really knowing Ruby makes it a lot easier to understand.