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

I started with "Agile Development With Rails" and I hear good things about the SitePoint book "Simply Rails 2". The thing to consider, especially with Rails, is to make sure that the edition you're reading is relevant. Rails moves extremely fast and I've found that finding accurate, timely documentation is hard. It's a mash of blogs and random wiki documentation across multiple websites. Take the time to make sure you're getting the right documentation about the right version.

Answer 2

This question has been asked in similar forms a few times on StackOverflow. Here's a link to one similar question.

Answer 3

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Simply Rails 2 is a great book that I've been using to get started with Rails

Answer 4

I agree with "The Rails Way". It just covers more advanced topics than most other books.

Answer 5

After Agile Web Development with Rails, my favourite is Practical Rails Projects, which goes over rails by 'developing' several projects, using features such as web services, REST, javascript, etc.