Best Books on Rails
Compared to Ruby, the pickings are slim for great books that try to explain core Rails from end-to-end. Generally, each good book on Rails approaches a part of the Rails elephant.
Here are the ones I recommend:
Ruby, Thomas, and Hansson, Agile Web Development with Rails, 3d ed. (Amazon). If you’re taking this course, you should own this already. AWDR touches all the bases, but still has sections that drive readers a little bit crazy. But . . . essential.
David Griffiths, Head First Rails (Amazon; Safari). If you’re a learn-by-doing person and have the time to work through a book, this is the one. The Head First books know a lot about triggering learning in your brain through exercises and pictures. I think this book is most worthwhile very early in your experience with Rails; afterwards it may feel redundant.
Eldon Alameda, Practical Rails Projects (Amazon). The examples in this book are real-world and slick. Almeda has a good way at demonstrating how quickly you can get stuff done with Rails, selected Gems, and Rails plugins. A lot of good stuff on integrating Ajax/JavaScript with Rails.
Brad Ediger, Advanced Rails (Amazon; Safari). The natural followup to AWDR for readers who really have to get it right. The best aspect of this book is that it dares to go into some depth on topics such as the database, security, and performance.
Dan Chak, Enterprise Rails (Amazon; Safari). The meat of this book is about leveraging the underlying power of your database, using features that are a bit out of the Rails mainstream (composite keys; views; triggers; etc.). The book also benefits from understanding from the get-go that your new shiny enterprise app should be exposing and consuming services (SOAP, REST).
Obie Fernandez, The Rails Way (Amazon; Safari). This book is a ginormous grab bag of real-world scar tissue on just about every Rails topic. Want to know how and when the Rails Class Loader runs? Check. Should RESTful resource be nested deeply? Check. What’s wrong with CookieStore? Check. To buy after completing two Rails applications.