My copy of the above-titled book arrived today, so I'll hopefully be able to properly get stuck into learning Ruby and Rails at last.
With the little bits I've played around with so far, it does indeed look like it can live up to the hype, it's just going to take me a bit of adjustment to get used to Ruby rather than PHP.

supersonic feet » Blog Archive » PHP on Trax
[...] I did mention quite a while ago I was going to look into doing some development in RoR, but a hectic work schedule has meant I haven’t actually got round to it properly yet. The main problem is that not only do I have to learn Rails’ workings, I need to learn Ruby too and the doubling of required effort means it’s gonna need a bit more dedicated time to sit and get to grips with it properly. [...]
October 15, 2005 6:04pm