Several people had mentioned the RubyKoans to me. It took me a while to get started on it, but I’m glad I did, and finally finished them just a few days ago!
All you need to do is to install Ruby (try RubyInstaller if you’re Windows), download RubyKoans (it’s just a bunch of text files zipped up), get on the command line, and go for it. You run “ruby path_to_enlightenment.rb”, and it’ll get you started. The Koans are just a bunch of unit tests that walk you through learning the core aspects of the Ruby language.
As I was going through the Koans, I pushed my progress to a Bitbucket repository.
I hope to revisit this repository as I learn Ruby better am able to improve some of the code I wrote here. By the way, as you’re going through the Koans and either get stuck on a step or are wondering how other people have solved it, just search for it on the web; most often you’ll find blog posts, StackOverflow posts, or GitHub or BitBucket repositories where other people have shared their solutions.