Great way to start with Ruby

Yes, books…

** UPDATED – November, 2009 **

1 – I have purchased the Programming Ruby 1.9 book from Pragmatic Programmers, and this is an excellent book that guides you through Ruby from the very beginning (you do not even need to know what classes and methods are) to the very end (which is a long section describing methods). I recommend everyone to purchase it, because before you know Ruby on Rails, it helps a LOT to know Ruby. It’s as simple as that.

2 – After that, the best book on Ruby on Rails is the Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd edition) book. I have actually read this one from start to finish and found it the most useful resource. You should definitely get the 3rd edition that came out in March 2009 and covers many new things in Rails.

3 – A good, concise guide on Ruby is The Ruby Programming Guide, co-written by the author of Ruby himself – Yukihiro Matsumoto. It goes into details of Ruby syntax and shows you the differences between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9. If you’re a programmer with experience, you should opt for this one.

4 – Another very good book that you could just read from cover to cover is The Rails Way. It’s not as up to date as the Agile Web Development book, but some of the things there are more and better explained, so it’s a good backup option – it definitely was for me! If you are a beginner Rails programmer, but have some experience in programming – this is a very good book.

5 – Finally, this book helped me with my mashup projects, as it explains to you how you could use Google Maps, Flickr, Yahoo, etc. – Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects. It provides you some ready code to copy&paste into your project.

If you have any more books you found useful – add them in the comments.