I have spent about a week reading through the book Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional and have learned a lot about ruby. Coming from OOP background already it really hasen’t been to difficult to learn the basics. However, I’m feeling a little uninspired to finish the rest of the book. The reason being that most of it seems to focus on learning ruby outside the context of rails. Does anyone have suggestions on a good book to read next that focus on learning ruby within the context of rails 3?
I will say for the record that I think Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional was excellent for learning the basics of the language. However, now that I feel confident in reading and writing basic ruby programs would like to focus on rails – not tutorials for small little programs outside the context of rails.
I ended up picking up Agile Web Development With Rails which seems to be a good fit. The major flaw of the book itself so far seems to be how light it is on ruby itself. If I hadn’t already read stuff on ruby itself the book tutorials would make much less sense. The book has a single chapter on ruby which is really light. So be warned. Otherwise though seems to be good introduction to rails for programmers familiar with other languages already. Not really something I would recommend for those not familiar with programming.
If your intention is to dig deeper into the wonders of the the Ruby language, I guess the Pickaxe Book is the book to get.
Like the Agile Web Development With Rails book you mentioned, it is also published by the Pragmatic Programmers Publishers (they do have quite a great collection of books about the Ruby and Rails)
Beside being fairly easy to follow and highly instructive, it is de facto the reference for the Ruby language.