I recently picked up Ansible with nearly no system administration background. I came from a Python background, but I didn't want to learn Chef/Puppet/Salt since there is apparently a fairly significant learning curve.
Anyway, Ansible has been great for small/medium sized projects. I haven't used it for anything large, so I can't really speak if you're planning on working on big projects. I was able to pick it up in a day, and after a few days I felt I was comfortable with it. For me, copying parts of other people's playbooks from Github and trying to understand it was the best way to learn after getting an overview from the documentation. Just start with something small - like installing & configuring a database, and work your way up the stack. Can't speak to any other dev-ops tools since Ansible is the first I've learned, but I've been happy with it.