What are your favorite Ruby on Rails books and why

Question

I'm looking to pick up a few books on RoR to help teach myself how to build a scalable RoR app. I have read the RailsSpace book, and am starting the Rails Way book tonight.

Some topics of interest are:

• REST - considering using Amazon's SimpleDB
• Using RSpec effectively
• memcached - server architecture and code implementation
• mongrel - server architecture
• MySQL

Answer 1

Rails Recipes and Advanced Rails Recipes are great straightforward books for just getting things done. I've just started reading The Art of Rails which covers some more advanced topics such as meta-programming, API design and RSpec. I'm enjoying it so far.

Answer 2

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The Rails Way is an excellent book. However, don't forget to read plenty of websites. For example, The Rails Way.

Answer 3

I quite liked the Rails Recipes books, as they're a good collection of best practices. For learning rails, the Agile book is the standard.

Answer 4

Agile Web Development With Rails is always a good starting point for Rails newcomers.

I really liked this book because of it's example driven approach to teaching you the framework. They walk through building an application step by step which I think really helps you get your head around the gist of the Rails framework.

Answer 5

Agile Web Development With Rails is my favorite book for rails!

If you need more information use google :)

Answer 6

I'm currently reading;

• Ruby on Rails for Dummies
• Simply Rails 2.0
• Agile Web evelopment with Rails

They're all good, (probably listed in order of complexity)