When I started working with Ruby on Rails a few months ago, being something of a book addict, I collected all the related books I could find. I even read substantial parts of many of them.

Here’s a quick rundown of the current landscape as I see it. Please post a comment to add your thoughts about any of these books.

There are several more books due in the first quarter of 2007, which I list at the end.

Agile Web Development with Rails, now in a brand-new second edition, is the essential book. After walking through basic Rails concepts and installation, the first third of the book describes a simple online store application (Depot). The discussion moves forward in logical steps and is a great introduction to Rails—as long as you’re already comfortable with Ruby basics. There’s a short intro to Ruby as an appendix, but if you’re new to Ruby, I recommend at least one Ruby book as a companion to this one.

This is the only major book available as I write this that is aligned with Rails 1.2, and it reflects recent changes in the preferred ways of doing things in Rails (such as RESTful routes).

The second section (the largest chunk of this book) is a systematic description of the Rails Framework. While the application-building walkthrough from the first part of the book is a great way to get a sense of how Rails applications are built, the second section provides a more thorough introduction and a much more useful reference. The book wraps up with a valuable section on securing and deploying applications.

In addition to being available as a bound book through all the usual places, you can buy it as a PDF download (or a download-plus-bound-book) from the publisher.

Ruby for Rails also walks through building an example Rails application, in this case an online music store. Unlike AWDWR, it starts with a great introduction to Ruby that explores the stylistic aspects as well as the mechanics. It doesn’t have the depth of material on Rails that AWDWR does, but it has a lot of very helpful material on Ruby that’s missing in the other book. And because it focuses on Ruby as used in Rails applications, I found it more helpful that the usual Ruby references (listed later in this article).

Once you have Rails basics down and are looking to do more, Rails Recipes provides a few dozen quick explanations of how to accomplish specific tasks, from “in-place editing” to “creating dynamic test fixtures”. Not a beginner book, but great for developers seeking quick solutions to more advanced problems.

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce is a useful, but misnamed, book. The example application that this book explores is indeed an e-commerce application (“the Emporium”), but what makes the book unique is its use of test-driven development (TDD). If you’re new to Rails, I recommend reading AWDWR first (since the TDD material adds yet another thing to grasp as you’re coming up to speed), and then following up with this book to explore TDD application development.

The slim Ruby on Rails: Up and Running is a very quick tour of building a photo sharing site. It’s a little steep as an introduction if you’re new to Rails but could be a quick start if you’re an experienced web developer and know some Ruby.

Beginning Ruby on Rails is the gentlest of the Rails books, assuming no programming knowledge and walking through Ruby and Rails in slow, well-explained steps. It could be a good first book if you find the top two books on this list to be tough going. But if you have some programming experience, you can skip this book. It describes the simplest ways to do things in Rails, not the best practices, so consider it as a first step only.

Ruby Books

These books are not Rails-focused, but to use Rails well you need a good grounding in the Ruby language. If your focus is on Rails, I’d recommend Ruby for Rails (listed above) first.

Programming Ruby, often called “The Pickaxe Book” because of the image on the cover, is the most widely used reference on the Ruby language. If you want a non-Rails-oriented introduction to Ruby, this is the book to start with.

The Ruby Way is a more advanced book than Programming Ruby and is a good follow-on if you want to learn more about the Ruby way of doing things after reading that book. The second edition was published in late 2006, so it is quite up-to-date.

The Ruby Cookbook follows in the mold of O’Reilly’s other cookbooks, providing quick solutions to common problems. Once you’re familiar with Ruby basics and want specifics on how to perform a wide variety of tasks, this book is a great resource.

But wait! There’s more!

Several Rails-related topics have been covered in e-books, which usually cost around $10 are are the length of a couple of typical book chapters:

• Rubyisms in Rails

• Rails Plugins: Extending Rails Beyond the Core

• Mongrel: Serving, Deploying, and Extending Your Ruby Applications

• Capistrano and the Rails Application Lifecycle

• RJS Templates for Rails

• Web Services on Rails

More to Come

And, of course, there’s lots more books in the pipeline: