1. Can anyone recommend any good books on beginning Ruby on Rails? I have good general programming knowledge (I can do ASP/ASP.NET/PHP etc) but I've never used Ruby and I want to add it as another string to my bow.
2. How come RoR has taken off so much with startups? Admittedly I can only name Justin.tv and Twitter off the top of my head right now, but it seems to be the startup language of choice at the moment. Why is this?
2. Because it's been designed by smart people who "get it" with regards to agile development, which is what startups need. In addition, the community has a "culture" which many startups identify with.