

Can you recommend some good RoR books? - luminary

We are thinking of scaling Agile to bigger teams (yes, there are challenges) and looking at Ruby on Rails. What are some good RoR books out there? TIA.
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petercooper
I own almost every Rails book in one format or another (I run a top Ruby blog
so I get them to review) and... it depends what you're trying to do.

The Rails Way kicks ass once you already know Rails to a certain extent - it's
definitely not a first book. It's a "bible" type book and is stuck somewhere
back in Rails 2.1 land, I believe, but most of it still applies.

AWDwR is reasonable and mostly up to date (focused at Rails 2.2, as far as I
recall) and particularly suited for people who are totally new to Rails.

My recommendation for people who are new to both Ruby _and_ Rails is
Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Alameda as it has a 30 page primer to Ruby
included and spends a long time "touring" Rails. It also covers RSpec which,
given you're Agile, might be of significant interest to you.

Books I'd steer away from either because they're out of date or just plain bad
IMHO would be all of the Packt books and Beginning Rails from Apress (the
latter, hopefully, will be brought up to date in a 2nd edition).

~~~
gtani
all good rec's. Some others, all well-reviewed on amazon and assuming you have
a team of java /C, C++, C# / PHP, python or some kind of web app coders

\- Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black (infinite number stars!)

\- the 2 Wrox books, Professional Rails (Rappin), Art of (Benson)

\- Advanced rails (Oreilly, Ediger);

The one i'd stear clear of, i don't remember who wrote it, but it has a
picture of an ocean wave on the cover.

~~~
petercooper
A book with an ocean wave doesn't ring any bells. One edition of AWDwR has a
hammock and an ocean, but I don't think that's what you mean.

The Well Grounded Rubyist is okay but yeah, you'd definitely need good OO
experience first because it doesn't go into OO basics whatsoever. It does
cover the dynamic features of Ruby quite well though.

I also forgot to mention the Sitepoint book - Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web
Applications. An excellent hobbyist book. I suspect pro developers might find
some issues with it though (without cracking it open again I can't elaborate
on this but I did hear some comments, despite liking it myself).

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ianbishop
Agile Web Development with Rails was one of the better books that were around
when I first started learning Ruby/Rails.

I don't know that it still has the presence in the community that it first had
but I'm sure it is still a great read.

[http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-
development-...](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-
with-rails-third-edition)

~~~
abyssknight
I'm running through this myself. Up to Chapter 11 so far, but it is a great
book to both learn on and reference. Fair warning, it's a well sought after
book. I think my Amazon order was "backordered" a few times before I canceled
and paid the "in-store tax".

One great thing with this book is that the foot-notes reference the changes
needed to get everything to play nice with 2.3 (the book was written for 2.2).

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acangiano
For Ruby books, checkout my page here:

* Recommended Ruby Books (<http://antoniocangiano.com/ruby-and-rails-recommended-books/>)

I have not updated the Rails page yet, but you should be fine with:

* Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition ([http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with-rails-third-edition))

Other books you may want to consider afterward are:

* The Art of Rails (<http://www.amazon.com/Art-Rails-Programmer/dp/0470189487>)

* Enterprise Rails (<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515201/>).

~~~
petercooper
Thanks for adding my book there, btw. I hadn't noticed till now.

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mhartl
I previously wrote the Rails tutorial _RailsSpace_ , which is now out-of-date
but was very well-received in its time (see the Amazon reviews at
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321480791> \--- ignoring the ones complaining that
it's out-of-date :-). To remedy the perennial problem of outdated Rails
tutorials, I'm currently working on an online Ruby on Rails tutorial book that
will be up-to-date (and easy to update!) by design.

It'll be a couple months before I really get cranking, but I expect to be
finished with the book by the end of the year. I'm also planning to make an
extended screencast series once the book is done. You can follow the project's
progress at <http://railstutorial.org/>.

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larrywright
I'll second the votes for The Rails Way, it really is good. Another one to
consider which I didn't see mentioned is an Apress book called "Practical
Rails Social Networking Sites". It's slightly out of date, though anything
written more than 6 months ago is. In spite of it's somewhat misleading title,
it's a good introduction to building a site in Rails, and touches on most of
the things you'd need to build any modern application. It serves as a good
introduction to Rails IMO.

One other really good resource is The Rails Guides:
<http://guides.rubyonrails.org> \- they cover everything, and are very up to
date. I use them regularly.

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thedevelopment
The Rails Way is pretty good.

[http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-
Professional-...](http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-
Ruby/dp/0321445619)

I've found the peepcode webcasts worth their weight in gold, but that's not a
book =)

And I found Design Patterns in Ruby pretty good for Ruby beginners

[http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-
Pr...](http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-
Professional/dp/0321490452/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251065278&sr=1-1)

<http://peepcode.com/>

~~~
luminary
Thank you, sir.

------
r7000
Take a look at Ryan Bates' Railscasts @ <http://railscasts.com>. Many are very
helpful.

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Sapient
Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
[http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-
development-...](http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-
with-rails-third-edition)

has served me well...

~~~
WJSimacek
+1 for this book, although you either need to use Rails 2.2.2 or find the
great site I found where a guy created a pdf with all the screenshots of
working through the depot program with Rails 2.3.2. That saved me.

------
100k
I like "Enterprise Rails". It's a rather contrarian Rails book in that it
doesn't hew to the Rails anti-DB orthodoxy. It's clearly written and has a
good example that evolves over the course of the book. It's meant to be a 2nd
Rails book, after you're familiar with the framework.

[http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Rails-Dan-
Chak/dp/059651520...](http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Rails-Dan-
Chak/dp/0596515200)

------
isharan
The main thing you want to do when learning Rails is to make sure you're
pretty solid in Ruby. David Black's Well-Grounded Rubyist covers a lot of
Ruby.

As for Rails, I have nothing but good things to about Foundation Rails 2 by
Eldon Alameda. He gives a brief introduction to Ruby at the beginning, and
doesn't rely on scaffolding/plugins, something a lot of early Rails developers
try and overuse. Although, now that I think about it, the routing chapter was
a little weak. Of course there's also the standard Agile Web Development with
Rails (3rd Edition) which was written by the creator of Rails.

After that, the best place is to start writing apps and get some hands-on
experience. If you want, there's another book that Eldon Alameda wrote called
"Practical Rails Projects" which does exactly that -- guides you through 6 or
7 Rails projects to teach you all about Rails. However, it uses an older
version of Rails (1.2.3 compared to the current 2.3.3) but I'm sure a lot of
the concepts will still apply. You can always install an older version of
Rails to follow along.

~~~
njoubert
As for practical experience -

A great help to me was <http://www.opensourcerails.com/> It contains a whole
bunch of Rails apps to download, and then learn from the code.

------
mickt
This thread from a few weeks ago might be helpful:

"How do I learn Ruby & Rails?" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747342>

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jonny_noog
I know the question was asking for RoR book recommendations, but being quite
new to both Ruby and Rails when I started using Rails, I have found
"Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide" (AKA the Pickaxe Book) to
be an invaluable reference.

If you're already very experienced with Ruby, then please ignore. :P

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WJSimacek
I'm traveling right now so I don't have access to my library, but if you're
developing on Windoze, [first I'm sorry for you] ...but there's a really good
book that I think is called Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers. It has a
lot of insight on the challenges you will face setting up your box up through
deployment.

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adharma
I suggest you read <http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html> then I
recommend sitepoint Patrick Lenz - Simply Rails, although it is outdated
(rails 2.0.2) but it have a solid simply background on rails knowledge.

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compay
"Ajax on Rails," while focussed on Ajax, has a lot of really good general
information on Rails too, and is extremely well written. It's somewhat
outdated now (really all Rails books are) but still very much worth reading
IMHO.

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jcapote
Ruby for Rails, it really helps displace the "magic"

