Q:

Ruby On Rails Web Application Development From Scratch? 

Background
I am interested in getting to grips with some Ruby On Rails.  I've got 4 years experience programming in C#, ASP.Net, ASP.Net MVC, SQL Server and more recently Silverlight etc.  Obviously I've got a pretty good understanding about the various implementation routes that you can go down when writing web applications using C#, the issue is that I have literally no clue about Ruby On Rails, other than that Ruby is an awesome pure object oriented language and that Rails is a very quick way in which to build web applications using Ruby. 
What I'm After
So essentially I'm after a session that fills in the blanks, and helps me to understand the various ways of building web applications using ROR.  On top of this, i've found a few tutorials but they seem to be quite vague, so any documentation/samples would be very handy to help get me started. 
More Detail
Popular IDE'S to use for development (I've heard RubyMine is good from JetBrains). 
Possible database implementations to use (I know MySQL is an option but which version?) 
Is HTML/CSS used to style the web apps?! 
Interface plugins if used? 
General route to producing a highly Web 2.0 site that encompasses a fantastic user experience and a beautiful interactive interface. 
...You get the idea, I just need a bit of guidance getting clued up. 
Help greatly appreciated :-D

A:

I'd highly recommend starting by reading:

Programming Ruby (also available online)
Agile Web Development with Rails

You should start with the first one, but don't read it all the way through.  Once you get the basics of Ruby down, you can switch to the Rails book, but feel free to switch back and forth as you get more familiar with both Ruby and Rails. 
The books are both very well written, and they're actually fun to read as far as technical books go.  They do a great job of explaining the basics to a total newbie and also really digging in deep.  You'll have all of your initial questions answered within a few hours.