Get whoever coded this site for you to explain how to deploy it, in enough detail that you would be very confident re-deploying it several times a day if you wanted to. If the original coder is unavailable, find a hacker friend who can figure the process out for you.
Once you're comfortable deploying, start making really small changes. Don't bother with books or classes yet - they'll round-out your knowledge once you know the basics, but in my experience they're not much use for getting people started. Begin by just editing bits of text on the website. Then progress to really small pieces of functionality. Try to deploy some small positive change to the site at least once a day. Doing this will build your confidence and get you to the point where you can make gradually bigger and bigger changes.
Comments
Get whoever coded this site for you to explain how to deploy it, in enough detail that you would be very confident re-deploying it several times a day if you wanted to. If the original coder is unavailable, find a hacker friend who can figure the process out for you.
Once you're comfortable deploying, start making really small changes. Don't bother with books or classes yet - they'll round-out your knowledge once you know the basics, but in my experience they're not much use for getting people started. Begin by just editing bits of text on the website. Then progress to really small pieces of functionality. Try to deploy some small positive change to the site at least once a day. Doing this will build your confidence and get you to the point where you can make gradually bigger and bigger changes.
I would recommend this advice as well. Deployment for Rails apps isn't as simple as uploading something to a remote server.
Here are some links specific for rails deployment:
http://www.capify.org http://www.modrails.com/
This is specific to hostingrails (a rails hosting company), but it's the simplest tutorial I've found...
http://www.hostingrails.com/wiki/1/How-to-deploy-a-Rails-app...
Some other technologies that you may need:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastcgi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongrel_%28web_server%29