New!? It isn't new it has been around for many years. Ruby is a scripting language. The rail part is a MVC concept for Ruby. I don't have much experience with this language other than a brief view of it some years ago.

It is an excellent framework for rapidly building robust web applications. See here:

Code School - TryRuby (Ruby)
Ruby on Rails Guides (Rails)
http://help.github.com/ (Git - version control)
Heroku | Cloud Application Platform (hosting)

Personally, I found there was nothing rapid about it at all. OP, if you're looking to get into programming you might find it easier to try something like PHP.

ROR was trendy 3 or 4 years ago but you barely hear anything about it now.