I own almost every Rails book in one format or another (I run a top Ruby blog so I get them to review) and... it depends what you're trying to do.

The Rails Way kicks ass once you already know Rails to a certain extent - it's definitely not a first book. It's a "bible" type book and is stuck somewhere back in Rails 2.1 land, I believe, but most of it still applies.

AWDwR is reasonable and mostly up to date (focused at Rails 2.2, as far as I recall) and particularly suited for people who are totally new to Rails.

My recommendation for people who are new to both Ruby and Rails is Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Alameda as it has a 30 page primer to Ruby included and spends a long time "touring" Rails. It also covers RSpec which, given you're Agile, might be of significant interest to you.

Books I'd steer away from either because they're out of date or just plain bad IMHO would be all of the Packt books and Beginning Rails from Apress (the latter, hopefully, will be brought up to date in a 2nd edition).

all good rec's. Some others, all well-reviewed on amazon and assuming you have a team of java /C, C++, C# / PHP, python or some kind of web app coders

- Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black (infinite number stars!)

- the 2 Wrox books, Professional Rails (Rappin), Art of (Benson)

- Advanced rails (Oreilly, Ediger);

The one i'd stear clear of, i don't remember who wrote it, but it has a picture of an ocean wave on the cover.

A book with an ocean wave doesn't ring any bells. One edition of AWDwR has a hammock and an ocean, but I don't think that's what you mean.

The Well Grounded Rubyist is okay but yeah, you'd definitely need good OO experience first because it doesn't go into OO basics whatsoever. It does cover the dynamic features of Ruby quite well though.

I also forgot to mention the Sitepoint book - Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications. An excellent hobbyist book. I suspect pro developers might find some issues with it though (without cracking it open again I can't elaborate on this but I did hear some comments, despite liking it myself).

That would be: Ruby on Rails Power!: The Comprehensive Guide by Aneesha Bakharia. Its currently rated 2/5 on Amazon.

For my 2 cents, I'd second both of Peter's suggestions - Foundation Rails 2 and Simply Rails 2 - though I do tend to like the former a little more. The latter is better if you have absolutely no prior web dev or programming experience.

AWD (to start) + Rails Way (for the details)

Agile Web Development with Rails was one of the better books that were around when I first started learning Ruby/Rails.

I don't know that it still has the presence in the community that it first had but I'm sure it is still a great read.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...

I'm running through this myself. Up to Chapter 11 so far, but it is a great book to both learn on and reference. Fair warning, it's a well sought after book. I think my Amazon order was "backordered" a few times before I canceled and paid the "in-store tax".

One great thing with this book is that the foot-notes reference the changes needed to get everything to play nice with 2.3 (the book was written for 2.2).

For Ruby books, checkout my page here:

* Recommended Ruby Books (http://antoniocangiano.com/ruby-and-rails-recommended-books/)

I have not updated the Rails page yet, but you should be fine with:

* Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...)

Other books you may want to consider afterward are:

* The Art of Rails (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Rails-Programmer/dp/0470189487)

* Enterprise Rails (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515201/).

Thanks for adding my book there, btw. I hadn't noticed till now.

I finally got around to updating the Rails version as well: http://antoniocangiano.com/rails-books/

I previously wrote the Rails tutorial RailsSpace, which is now out-of-date but was very well-received in its time (see the Amazon reviews at http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321480791 --- ignoring the ones complaining that it's out-of-date :-). To remedy the perennial problem of outdated Rails tutorials, I'm currently working on an online Ruby on Rails tutorial book that will be up-to-date (and easy to update!) by design.

It'll be a couple months before I really get cranking, but I expect to be finished with the book by the end of the year. I'm also planning to make an extended screencast series once the book is done. You can follow the project's progress at http://railstutorial.org/.

I'll second the votes for The Rails Way, it really is good. Another one to consider which I didn't see mentioned is an Apress book called "Practical Rails Social Networking Sites". It's slightly out of date, though anything written more than 6 months ago is. In spite of it's somewhat misleading title, it's a good introduction to building a site in Rails, and touches on most of the things you'd need to build any modern application. It serves as a good introduction to Rails IMO.

One other really good resource is The Rails Guides: http://guides.rubyonrails.org - they cover everything, and are very up to date. I use them regularly.

The Rails Way is pretty good.

http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-...

I've found the peepcode webcasts worth their weight in gold, but that's not a book =)

And I found Design Patterns in Ruby pretty good for Ruby beginners

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Pr...

http://peepcode.com/

Thank you, sir.

Take a look at Ryan Bates' Railscasts @ http://railscasts.com. Many are very helpful.

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...

has served me well...

+1 for this book, although you either need to use Rails 2.2.2 or find the great site I found where a guy created a pdf with all the screenshots of working through the depot program with Rails 2.3.2. That saved me.

+1 for this book, although you either need to use Rails 2.2.2 or find the great site I found where a guy created a pdf with all the screenshots of working through the depot program with Rails 2.3.2. That saved me.

I like "Enterprise Rails". It's a rather contrarian Rails book in that it doesn't hew to the Rails anti-DB orthodoxy. It's clearly written and has a good example that evolves over the course of the book. It's meant to be a 2nd Rails book, after you're familiar with the framework.

http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Rails-Dan-Chak/dp/059651520...

The main thing you want to do when learning Rails is to make sure you're pretty solid in Ruby. David Black's Well-Grounded Rubyist covers a lot of Ruby.

As for Rails, I have nothing but good things to about Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Alameda. He gives a brief introduction to Ruby at the beginning, and doesn't rely on scaffolding/plugins, something a lot of early Rails developers try and overuse. Although, now that I think about it, the routing chapter was a little weak. Of course there's also the standard Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd Edition) which was written by the creator of Rails.

After that, the best place is to start writing apps and get some hands-on experience. If you want, there's another book that Eldon Alameda wrote called "Practical Rails Projects" which does exactly that -- guides you through 6 or 7 Rails projects to teach you all about Rails. However, it uses an older version of Rails (1.2.3 compared to the current 2.3.3) but I'm sure a lot of the concepts will still apply. You can always install an older version of Rails to follow along.

As for practical experience -

A great help to me was http://www.opensourcerails.com/ It contains a whole bunch of Rails apps to download, and then learn from the code.

This thread from a few weeks ago might be helpful:

"How do I learn Ruby & Rails?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=747342

I know the question was asking for RoR book recommendations, but being quite new to both Ruby and Rails when I started using Rails, I have found "Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide" (AKA the Pickaxe Book) to be an invaluable reference.

If you're already very experienced with Ruby, then please ignore. :P

I'm traveling right now so I don't have access to my library, but if you're developing on Windoze, [first I'm sorry for you] ...but there's a really good book that I think is called Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers. It has a lot of insight on the challenges you will face setting up your box up through deployment.

I suggest you read http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html then I recommend sitepoint Patrick Lenz - Simply Rails, although it is outdated (rails 2.0.2) but it have a solid simply background on rails knowledge.

"Ajax on Rails," while focussed on Ajax, has a lot of really good general information on Rails too, and is extremely well written. It's somewhat outdated now (really all Rails books are) but still very much worth reading IMHO.

Ruby for Rails, it really helps displace the "magic"