With the amount of good Ruby and Rails books already on the market, you’d think 2008 would be a shy year when it comes to publishing new titles, but nothing could be further from the truth. The following books are all to be released this month or in May, and there are many more coming out this summer.
Do we really need another 7 titles on the market within 2 months time? Interestingly, the answer is yes, for two main reasons. First, most of them serve a specific purpose, rather than being generic introductions. Second, we have a hole in the Ruby and Rails book market. Ruby 1.9, despite being a development release, has been out for a while. More importantly, Rails 2 differs enough from Rails 1.2 (covered by most books out there) to require new tutorials for those who approach Rails for the first time and perhaps even for those who wish to upgrade.
I think that the Pragmatic Programmers made a mistake in deciding not to upgrade their Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition
Alright, to the titles then:
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Title: Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide (Third Edition)
Available: May 15, 2008 Notes: Currently in beta, it’s going to be the first book that fully covers Ruby 1.9 and its core and standard libraries. |
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Title: Simply Rails 2.0
Available: May 15, 2008 Notes: It’s the second edition of an already “gentle” introduction to Rails called Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications |
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Title: Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects
Available: May 5, 2008 Notes: It’s marketed as a practical intermediate/advanced title for creating RESTful applications. The topic and target audience make it interesting for many web developers. |
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Title: Agile Testing with Ruby and Rails
Available: May 19, 2008 Notes: It’s supposed to extensively cover TDD and BDD with Ruby and with Rails 2.0. |
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Title: Advanced Rails Recipes: 84 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps
Available: May 15, 2008 Notes: Currently in beta, it’s a Rails 2.0 cookbook by one of the most prominent developers in the community (Mike Clark). |
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Title: Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-by-Step Guide
Available: May 15, 2008 Notes: Currently in beta, it’s the book that should alleviate the pain of Rails deployment for many. Ezra is one of the biggest experts in the field, so I have great expectations for this title. |
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Title: FXRuby: Create Lean and Mean GUIs with Ruby
Available: Notes: Currently in beta, it covers cross-platform development with FXRuby, the Ruby wrapper for the FOX toolkit. The author, Lyle Johnson, is also the author of the gem. |
. It covers Rails 2, and if well written, it may be that missing guide for newcomers to Rails and beginner programmers, that I was talking about.I can’t speak firsthand for any of these books, having not had the opportunity to read them yet, but knowing some of the talent behind them I certainly have high hopes.
and 
. While the first doesn’t belong on the list, since it was published back in February, I wasn’t aware of the second one. It’s possible that there may even be further upcoming titles, too. The second title by Wrox seems to focus on the design patterns and methodologies of web development with examples of code written in Ruby/Rails. These kinds of books are usually either excellent, useful, inspiring, etc… or miss the mark entirely. If I manage to get hold of a copy I’ll let you know what I think.
. I’ll need to get hold of a copy as soon as possible so that I can check it out and decide if I should include it in
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