I'm going to write a mini series of blog posts about some of my favourite Rails resources. There more and more great stuff appearing everyday and I just want to help people choose the right resources so they get the most knowledge with the least headaches. Well to kick things off I'm going to tell you about my favourite Ruby and Rails paper based companions that have helped me get up to speed throughout the last year or so.

Agile web development with Rails - (4/5) This is the original guide to Rails written by Dave Thomas of pragmatic programmer fame and DHH himself. I would say make sure you get the 2nd edition. I got the first back in early 2006 long before the second was released but the second book is a must to get you up to date with all the latest 1.2 features including the much loved RESTfulness. Its a got a great getting started feel to it but also acts a pretty good reference when it digs into more details further on in the book.

Programming Ruby (The Pickaxe) - (5/5) Another Dave Thomas book is generally regarded as the definitive Ruby manual and when you try and lift the thing let alone read it you can see why. It starts off with a pretty good introduction to Ruby but it moves along quickly and is definitely for software developers with a bit of general OO experience under the belts. I have found it indispensible as a reference book. Ruby has a lot of power and a lot of libraries and yes you can get 10 lines of Java into 1 line of Ruby but theres a good chance you may have to look something up in here first to do it!

Rails Recipes - (5/5) This is a great book. Its not one for beginners but as soon as you have been involved in some real world Rails projects you will appreciate a lot of the incredibly tidy solutions to common problems that this book offers. My only issue is trying to remember all the great stuff in the book so I can use it rather than reinventing the wheel in a less optimal way myself. Looking forward to the next Chad Fowler book Advanced Rails Recipes coming soon!

Ruby For Rails - (3/5) David A Black attempts to contextualise rails a little better within the Ruby ecosystem. Its a good read and if you are a new Rails developer you will soon learn that to a be a good Rails developer you have to have strong understanding of Ruby and that means some of Ruby's rather powerful and perhaps unfamilier features like meta programming. This books goes somewhere to help out here but I did find it somewhat disjointed and difficult to read in places.

A very important point is that there is a whole lot more to being a good Rails developer than just Ruby and Rails knowledge. Books to do with managing your projects, version control, javascript, XHTML, CSS, Linux, HTTP, web servers are all very important reads to becoming better Rails developers. So in a future post I'll be talking about the best non Ruby and Rails books for Rails developers.