I’ve read a couple of Ruby and Ruby on Rails books now and for those who wonder which book is right for them, I want to give recommendations.

Ruby Books:

My favourite ruby book is the “The Ruby Programming Language” from O’Reillys shelf. It is written by David Flanagan (author of Javascript, The Definitive Guide) and Matz himself. This book is like a Definitive Guide but its not as heavy as the Javascript version as it is “only” 430 pages thick.
The big benefit of this book is that it covers all the new stuff from Ruby 1.9. I also like that it completely leaves out any kind of tutorial like part. It’s really all you need to know. Well written and reference like.

My second favourite book is from Addison Wesley and its called “The Ruby Way”. With 888 Pages this is even more like the definitive guide but there are some minor things that I don’t like about this book. So minor I won’t even mention them. If I had to chose between the O’Reilly book and this one I’d choose both.

The third book I can recommend is the Pragmatic book. This one is more for beginners as it starts with a tutorial that gives you a somewhat playful insight into the world of ruby. But once you’ve read this book and want to know more you will put this book aside and consider the previously mentioned ones.

Rails Books:

Same here. I’d highly recommend the Addison Wesley book “The Rails Way” because it is more like a reference to Rails and covers each aspect with way more details than the famous Pragmatic book which again starts with a tutorial that takes up half of the book. Its a very good and easy start for early Rails developers but it leaves so many questions open that you will definitly need another one. In this case – take the Addison Wesley one.