Book Recommendations for Ruby on Rails
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question by lexxwern | Easy
I am looking to get started with Ruby / Ruby on Rails. I am new to both of them. I have been working with PHP/Perl for a couple years now and am just looking to fool around with something new.
Is there any books that anyone would recomend? I see there is some new ones that are to be released in the next little while. I am not sure if I should hold off for while and wait for their release or if not that much has changed since the publish period of the current books on the market.
Thanks for the advice.
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Re: Book Recommendations for Ruby on Railsreply by Srirangan In other words, Bejaan recommends the Ruby books published by the Pragmatic Programmers, and I concur with these recommendations. I think he was recommending three particular books, which are the same three I would suggest.
1.) "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, Second Edition" by Dave Thomas is a good introduction and reference manual for general Ruby concepts. It's known as "the Pickaxe" because, well, there's a giant pickaxe on the cover. ;-)
2.) "Agile Web Development with Rails" by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson was the first Rails . It's well-written, easy to understand, and follows a format that I think works well. There's a second edition coming out in September, but if you need to get started now, just pick up the first edition. The second edition will cover new features of Rails 1.1, but the
first edition is still a good way to get started with Rails.
3.) "Rails Recipes" by Chad Fowler is a new book coming out in a few weeks. This book contains a lot of sample code explaining how to perform various common tasks. It's a lot like the O'Reilly "cookbook" series. It's not out yet, so I haven't read it myself, but the sample chapters looked great and I've pre-ordered a copy already.
There are also two other lesser-known Ruby books in the same series. "Enterprise Integration with Ruby" details using Ruby to connect to enterprise services like enterprise databases, LDAP, web services and RMI. "Best of Ruby Quiz" is a workbook on Ruby programming. I'm not very familiar with either of these, but it's possible that they may meet some of your specific needs.
Hope this helps.
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