Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition by Andreas Schwarz - This book to RoR is what Kerningham & Ritchie has been to C (buy the 3rd edition though)

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML youd need just to configure some other frameworks.

With this book, youll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Youll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the Ajax architecture).

Youll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. Youll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all.

This book to RoR is what Kerningham & Ritchie has been to C (buy the 3rd edition though)
A concise and accurate tutorial and reference to the Ruby on Rails framework.

Starting with the simple (and not very useful in real life..) "shopping cart" project the book demonstrates RoR web application fundamentals step by step. Shopping cart is a good, quick way to get acquainted with Rails if you are a newbie as I am.

When done building and playing with shopping cart you'll want to start designing your own ideas. Agile's following chapters include reference material which lets easily getting deeper understanding of how the framework is built and how it works. You'll find plenty of information of how to customize whatever you need to customize, as well as explanations of low level functions and APIs which are not used in the tutorial but may very well be used in more advanced applications.

Used to pretty good PHP online documentation available online I was hoping to learn RoR the same way, but RoR is different, and as far as I can tell there's simply no good tutorials available online. If you're in for learning RoR, buy the book, you won't regret.
I would recommend getting the 3rd edition (no hard copies yet) which covers RoR version 2.2.

(BTW - I've done most of the learning on my personal WinXP machine, and some on http://www.heroku.com, where you can write and run RoR apps online)

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