In this post I want to give you list of books for rails beginner or intermediate developer.
For Beginner
1. Learn Ruby on Rails by Daniel Kehoe
</img>Here’s the first book you should read. This book will give you basic introduction to rails. In step by step guide you will learn how to create mailing list with integration with MailChimp and GoogleDrive. I’ve included detailed review of learn ruby on rails book right here.
2. Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl
</img>Ruby on Rails Tutorial is a must read for every rails beginner. I think you should read this after learn ruby on rails book.
Are you bored with building example applications like how to create blog in rails? So here’s the step by step guide to creating Twitter like social network.
Not only this book covers rails perfectly, but it is perfect introduction to test driven development in rspec, styling with sass and tracking changes in your code in git.
3. Agile Web Development with Rails by David Heinemeier Hansson, Dave Thomas
</img>Here is the book written by two legendary figures in programming. David Heinemeier Hannson, founder of 37 signals, creator of Ruby on Rails framework and author of books like Getting Real, Rework and Remote and Dave Thomas author of legendary book Pragmatic Programmer that every developer should read. In this book you will learn how to create Depot, web based shopping cart application.
For intermediate developer
4. Rails Antipatterns by Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh
</img>Are you getting headaches from your masses of code? Did you find your rails code unreadable, difficult to maintain?
Maybe you will find your rails antipattern. Here’s the problem and solution guide to your problems.
What I like about this book that takes every part of Rails application separately. You will look at problems like too much code in models, using sql code where it don’t belong, bad habits brought from php and else.
5. The Rails View by Bruce Williams and Bruce Athayde
</img>Are you getting sick from combination of html and your template language in your views? Are you hoping that your views code should look better, but don’t know how?
Try Rails View book, in this book you will look at each part of views, you will find out solutions about how to improve your layout, you will learn some tricks about how to improve your stylesheets, adding some beauty to your forms, better javascripts code and other.
6. Deploying Rails by Anthony Burns and Tom Copeland
</img>Are you developing real world rails application and you wonder how to deploy it? Deploying Rails book is here for you.
In first part of the book you will learn how to create your own virtual server with Vagrant, then you move on open source server provision tool Puppet. Then you will be introduced to gems like Capistrano, Nagios for better deployment.
What’s next
If you’re beginner I recommend you to learn ruby first, I’ve wrote post about learning resources for ruby and if you have trouble with rails installation I wrote about how to install rails in my previous post. I hope that my list of books about Rails was helpful for you.