What Books Do Great Ruby/Rails Developers Read?
Which ones do they recommend? Which ones do they bring to work, share with their team or ask to have purchased for the office? What’s on the rest of our staff’s reading list? Well, I’m the guy that buys them for FiveRuns, so here’s a snapshot of our bookshelf.
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt
The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton
The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez
Deploying Rails Applications by Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Bruce A. Tate and Clinton Begin
Best of Ruby Quiz by James Edward Gray II
The Ruby Cookbook by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson
The Ruby Programming Language by D. Flanagan and Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson
High Performance MySQL
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen, with Forward by Obie Fernandez
The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond
Winners Never Cheat by Jon M. Huntsman
Pulling Strings with Puppet: Automated System Administration Done Right by James Turnbull
Advanced Rails by Brad Ediger
Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers by David Black
So which are we missing?
Continued Discussion
11 responses to this entry
What do you think about agile development 3 ?
on April 24, 2008 at 03:04 PM
Russ Olsen wrote “Design Patterns in Ruby”, Obie only wrote the foreword, and is the series editor.
on April 25, 2008 at 04:51 PM
Thanks for the catch, Rick. Apologies to Russ.
on April 28, 2008 at 08:23 PM
How about “The Art of UNIX Programming” by ESR?
http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Programming-Addison-Wesley-Professional-Computing/dp/0131429019/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209445786&sr=8-1
on April 29, 2008 at 12:14 AM
Restful Web Services is really great.
And so is Programming Collective Intelligence – it’s Python based, but there are lots of useful lessons for the Ruby world.
on April 29, 2008 at 04:07 AM
Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Kent Beck
on April 29, 2008 at 08:34 AM
Jack Vance “The Dying Earth”. Stay away from the ruby books! :-)
on April 29, 2008 at 05:36 PM
Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture Volume 1: A System of Patterns – best book on architectural patterns (think Gang of Four for solution architects).
Volume 2 in the series builds from the first volume and is great for building concurrent applications and systems that require redundancy and availability when dealing with networking.
on April 29, 2008 at 09:46 PM
Nice to see most of those are on my bookshelf. And also… Peopleware, by DeMarco & Lister Headfirst Design Patterns, by Freeman & Freeman Practices of an Agile Developer, Subramaniam & Hunt Designing the Obvious, Robert Hoekman
on April 30, 2008 at 03:15 AM
Keep recommending my book and no apologies are ever necessary!
Russ
on April 30, 2008 at 12:19 PM
The Selfish Class http://www.laputan.org/selfish/selfish.html
This is an excellent paper and goes a long way in describing why Rails was as successful as it is and the problems people have w/ the PHP community. It’ss a great read for anyone writing software and wanting it to be adopted.
on May 06, 2008 at 02:49 PM