Web and Rails

This is a list of good Ruby, or Ruby on Rails books that I find are worth getting.

  • Advanced Rails Recipes: 84 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps (Pragmatic Programmers)

    Advanced Rails Recipes: 84 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps (Pragmatic Programmers)

    by Mike Clark

    5 stars

    Lots of Nice Sophisticated How-Tos

    I've got most of the books of the Pragmatic Bookshelf and this one seems to be just as good as the others though I've yet go through the entire book. What's nice about this book is that the recipes touch on important yet broad reaching problems. It may even propose more than one solution to the same (or similar) problem. For example some of the topics discussed in the book include: full text searching, master/slave databases, creating wizards (multi-step forms), uploading images and creating thumbnails, using lowpro for nice and unobtrusive javascript and Ajax, BackgroundDRb for offloading long running tasks, lots of stuff on caching and much more...

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  • Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition

    Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition

    by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, Andreas Schwarz

    5 stars

    The Best Book to Learn Rails

    This is the second edition of the book and both are excellent. Of course there is no point in getting the old edition anymore. If you are looking for the fast track to learning Rails this is it. It walks you through the creation of a full featured website with Ajax scripting and all. Then the Rails framework itself is explained in a straight forward manner. If you get a single Rails book then I recommend this one.

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  • Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide (Facets of Ruby)

    Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide (Facets of Ruby)

    by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, Clinton Begin

    4 stars

    For when you get serious about Rails

    In this book you will learn to select a good hosting solution (shared, VPS, dedicated...), about using Capistrano and managing Mongrel. Finally, you will also have an overview of scaling Rails applications using clusters. I must admit that I have not read the book yet but only skimmed it. It's here because I think that it should be part of the arsenal of anyone serious about Rails development.

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  • Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! (Pragmatic Programmers)

    Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! (Pragmatic Programmers)

    by Christophe Porteneuve

    5 stars

    Get the most of browsers

    Want to know more about developing nice Web 2.0 applications? This book along with "Agile Web Development with Rails" are what you need. In this one we go much deeper into the inner workings of what goes on behind the scenes on the client side of your Rails apps and there is a chapter dedicated to the integration with Rails.

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  • Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer (Pragmatic)

    Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer (Pragmatic)

    by Justin Gehtland, Ben Galbraith, Dion Almaer

    4 stars

    Must for Web 2.0 developers

    This book is really about doing things on the client side. You will learn that though we are used to prototype on Rails, there are other frameworks worth looking. The author shows us many "standard" usage of Ajax such as form validation or autocompletion. Finally, there is a section that discusses the integration with Rails.

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  • Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion (The Pragmatic Starter Kit Series)(2nd Edition)

    Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion (The Pragmatic Starter Kit Series)(2nd Edition)

    by Mike Mason

    5 stars

    All you will need to know about SVN

    Though not specifically about Ruby or Rails, you can't realistically pursue more than a trivial project without some form of version control system. There are many options to achieve this but since the Rails community tends Subversion mostly I suggest that you do the same. Subverison is widely available and will eventually replace CVS so why not just start with it.

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  • Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide

    Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide

    by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, Andy Hunt

    4 stars

    THE Ruby Starting Point and More

    This is an excellent book to learn the Ruby programming language and it even goes into some details with many of the standard libraries. This 3rd edition, covers Ruby 1.9 and has much more material than the previous edition. The books layout and design has been much improved from the previous edition and though you won't "read" this book as you would others, to me this IS the Ruby reference. It really is a must.

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