A.3. Recommended Books
Over the past few years there has been a surge of Ruby and Rails books being published. After reading this book, you may be wondering what you could read next to further your knowledge. There seems to be two possible directions: getting to know more about Ruby or gathering a greater level of insight into Rails. My recommendation is that you do both, and you are probably better off doing them at the same time.
For Ruby, if you are a novice programmer, I would suggest you read either of the following two books:
Ruby for Rails by David A. Black, ISBN: 1932394699
Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional by Peter Cooper, ISBN: 1590597664
They are both excellent at bringing you from "zero" to a solid knowledge of the language.
Should you already be an intermediate or experienced object-oriented programmer, you should probably be able to study either of the following two instead:
The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto, ISBN: 0596516177
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt, ISBN: 0974514055
Flanagan and Matz's book is simply amazing. It covers — with a lawyer-like rigor — the core aspects of the language (both 1.8 and 1.9), like no other book I've read on the topic so far. Even experienced Ruby programmers can learn from it. Dave Thomas' book, on the other hand, is a bit broader in scope and more tutorial-like. Being the first English book on the subject, it's ...
Get Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.