Personally I am more of a fan of the nginx/Unicorn combination (I tried to compare different hosting approaches here).
My server currently runs some small Rails applications (using this stack) and PHP for Piwik analytics stuff.
I have written an ebook which covers setting up a Rails server completely from scratch (using rbenv, nginx, Unicorn and MySQL) and illustrates how to deploy an application manually - the goal is to help readers understand the inner workings of the deployment process.
It should not be too hard to use the steps from the book with Apache instead of nginx if you do not want to run two webservers in parallel.
It's free for people on my mailing list. If you are interested, you can grab your copy here.