Vohra makes strong emphasis on suggesting that Ruby on Rails has advantages over PHP and over Java. Of course, this stirs up fans of those approaches. But approaching Ruby on Rails through this book shows a fairly easy language to learn. You can code with an object oriented outlook, as well as using the Model-View-Controller pattern or architecture. Experience in other languages has shown OO and MVC to be very useful, especially for developing web applications.
The book also takes the programmer into the use of Ajax. This highly popular method is readily compatible with Ruby and Rails. So too is the idea of running a Web Service. The latter is typically defined strictly in terms of [ascii] XML messages. Leaving the developer to choose an application language. Well, the book suggests that Ruby on Rails is a plausible choice.
And for those of you already using the Eclipse IDE, Vohra explains how Ruby can be coded inside Eclipse. So you don't have to abandon Eclipse. I've noticed that Eclipse users tend to be avid fans of it, and deeply reluctant to leave its nice surroundings.