 | Head First Rails: A learner's companion to Ruby on Rails by David Griffiths
Buy new: £21.95 / Used from: £15.00 I really like the style of the Head First series, but you might not. It's worth taking a good look at one so that you can decide.
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 | Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz
Buy new: £18.00 / Used from: £19.11 A well-regarded introduction to Rails.
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 | Rails for .NET Developers: Pragmatic Programmers (Facets of Ruby) by Jeff Cohen
Buy new: £23.74 / Used from: £13.33 This book might be more useful to current .NET developers than those above.
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 | Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) by Sam Ruby
Buy new: £22.09 / Used from: £25.05 AWDR is the defacto official book, but I didn't like the previous edition, so haven't looked at this latest one.
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 | The Rails Way: Driving Rails into the Enterprise (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby) by Obie Fernandez
Buy new: £17.99 / Used from: £12.75 Often recommended as the next book that you should get after you learn the basics of Rails.
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 | The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt
Buy new: £15.91 / Used from: £15.00 Every programmer should know this classic book, but the ideas that it teaches have become absolutely pervasive in the Ruby community
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 | The Well-Grounded Rubyist: Get the ebook FREE! by David Black
Buy new: £19.19 / Used from: £20.93 Get this book once you've learned the basics of Ruby, and want to go further with the language. It might seem a bit heavy for a beginner, because it is scrupulously thorough.
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 | MySQL (Developer's Library) by Paul DuBois
Buy new: £15.99 / Used from: £29.94 Probably the best book around on the MySQL database server.
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 | Pragmatic Version Control Using Git: 1 (Pragmatic Starter Kit) by Travis Swicegood
Buy new: £13.94 / Used from: £9.00 There are many very good resources online for Git, but this is the first complete book to reach print.
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 | Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual by David Pogue
Buy new: £15.48 / Used from: £9.12 You don't have to use a Mac to develop with Rails, but if you do decide to get a Mac, this is the best book on OS X.
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 | TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac (Pragmatic Programmers) by James Gray
Buy new: £13.06 / Used from: £14.99 TextMate is a standard with Mac Rubyists. Unfortunately, most of it's power is not obvious, or clearly documented. I think that this book is essential to get the most out of what is an amazing editor.
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 | Beginning Ubuntu LTS Server Administration : From Novice to Professional, 2nd Edition (Expert's Voice in Linux) by Sander van Vugt
Buy new: £17.21 / Used from: £5.15 Linux is the standard server operating system for Rails deployment. This is a good choice if you haven't used a UNIX-like system before.
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 | Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails by Maik Schmidt
Buy new: £23.79 / Used from: £15.24 Sounds interesting.
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 | High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More by Baron Schwartz
Buy new: £21.30 / Used from: £21.63 For when the database setup starts to really matter.
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Listmania!
