I've been trying to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the past 6 months. I've gone through tryruby.com, rails for zombies, watched many of the RailsCasts, and built a couple apps on my own to learn the language, but I still consider myself a novice.

Sure I can implement many gems into my application and just hack together other peoples work, but I really am gaining no knowledge of the Ruby behind all these gems and have no clue what the best practices for Rails are.

Online materials for Ruby and Rails are always made for different versions of the languages/frameworks and that can make things very complicated at times for someone just starting out.

So what do you recommend to REALLY learn Ruby and Rails?