So, I went to the local bookstore and loaded up on two popular books on Ruby:
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
This is a comprehensive book on the Ruby language. It looks like a good choice to learn the language. I know there must be other good books out there, though. I just don’t have the time to go through them all to find the best one. This book is informally known as the “Pick Axe” book because of the front cover. The first edition of the book can be found online, here.
Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide
Looks like a fairly comprehensive guide to Rails. Of course, you need to know Ruby to get the most out of it. It’s also helpful to know a little bit of MySQL syntax for creating tables. Here’s one MySQL tutorial. Here’s another.
I’m also using a few websites in my quest to learn Ruby:
Ruby-doc.org: A great resource. Online documentation for classes found in the Ruby Core as well as the Standard Library. Has nice, tight introduction of Things That Newcomers to Ruby Should Know.
Ruby-lang.org: The official Ruby Language site. All things ruby, learning is only one part, so it’s a bit overwhelming for someone new to the language.
RubyGarden.org’s Wiki. Haven’t spent much time, but looks more useful to a beginner than the overwhelming Ruby-lang.org.
What’s Missing?
There’s one thing missing from the above list of resources: a good Ruby idioms resource. Idioms are ways to code things that are specific to Ruby. Idioms are typically confusing to people new to the language, but make sense on their own terms. I’m on the look out for a good idioms resource…
All the above assumes you have experience in at least one other object oriented language. These are not good resources to learn object oriented programming; so, if you’ve never programmed before, you’ll be lost.