Rails Recipes (Pragmatic Programmers)

Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (Pragmatic Programmers)

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition

Ajax in Action

Web Programming

Ruby for Rails : Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers

Format: Paperback
Author: David Black
ReleaseDate: 11 May, 2006
Publisher: Manning Publications
Rating:

Very Repetitive, Slow Read for New Programmers only
It got very good reviews so I bought it without ever looking inside. I was really disappointed with this book. It says it's written for programmers from many different backgrounds, but it's really for fairly new programmers. The author repeats himself a lot and is incapable of stating things in a concise manner.

I would prefer a book that gets right to the point and highlights what's important or not intuitive. The intro section on MVC is a good example of his repetition. You find yourself thinking you're reading the same sentence several times.

You'll still learn a good amount about Ruby and Rails from this book, but if you've been programming for a while you'll be aggravated by the pace this books introduces the material.

So in short, if you are relatively new to programming, this could be a good book for you. If you are looking for a quick start this may also meet your goal, but it's done in about twice (maybe three times) as many pages as necessary.

The Missing Bridge Between Rails and Ruby
At that point I decided I really needed to know some more Ruby to progress further so I bought and read most of the Pickaxe book. I worked by way through the Agile Web Dev (AWD) book until I got bogged down in the CRUD chapters. I then went back to AWD and read the rest of the book. But there was still something missing, something that would explain more about how Rails uses Ruby

Then this book was released and I immediately purchased it. Im very glad I did. This book really does fill in the holes in my understanding of how Rails works. By working methodically through explanations of features of the Ruby language, and through Rails examples, the author does a great job of explaining all the ins and outs of Rails.

The timing for me, could not have been more prefect. I would like to congratulate the author on a job well done and look forward to meeting him at the next nycruby. org meeting.

Excellent Ruby Reference
Though, this book covers Ruby basics such as basic constructs, expressions, exceptions, YAML, etc, but not as much detail as DT's book. For last couple of years, I have mainly rely on Dave Thomas'"Programming Ruby", but I found this book complementary to DT's book. Also, it didn't cover xml, cgi, network, threads, drb, testing and continuation. However, it covered a number of other topics such as collections, singleton methods, blocks/lamdas, eval, etc. in much more detail. The only disappointment was that I found link to Rails a bit weak. Though, this book had a few examples of Rails code and Rails application code, but it didn't cover much of the internals of Rails especially metaprogramming and DSL, which is the heart of Rails framework. .