Ruby Book List

Learning Ruby

You’re taking your first steps into Ruby

The Well Grounded Rubyist

A good introduction to programming in general. Easy on newer programmers.

Eloquent Ruby

A good introduction to Ruby and its’ style. Slightly more in depth than the Well Grounded Rubyist as far as language tricks.

Programming Ruby

The pickaxe book, written by some of the best in the industry and often mentioned as the de-facto starting point

An Illustrated Guide to Ruby

An illustrated guide to Ruby written by yours truly. Currently a work in progress, but aims to teach Ruby to complete beginners using pictures of Lemurs and various programming concepts.

Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

A programming adventure for Ruby beginners illustrated with cartoon foxes. Released in 2004.

Intermediate Ruby

You’ve got the basics, now it’s time to refine them a bit and get your references

POODR

Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby covers how OO should work in Ruby and helps you on your way to leveraging that power.

99 Bottles of OOP

Takes the ideas of POODR and applies them in a practical way to a single problem and explains the trades offs in leveraging the power of OOP.

Design Patterns in Ruby

The GoF book comes to Ruby. Be forewarned that you should read POODR first and take some of these patterns with a heavy grain of salt.

Confident Ruby

Learn how to write Ruby confidently, avoiding patch hacks and ugly kludgery.

Exceptional Ruby

Making code work is one thing, making it behave itself with failure? Learn about Ruby exceptions and their power.

Doing things with Ruby

So you’ve learned Ruby, now what?

Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts

Get a feel for some more practical Ruby usage

Advanced Ruby

Using the advanced features of the language or just outright difficult concepts.

Metaprogramming Ruby

Want to learn some black magic in Ruby? All of that meta-goodness that you’ve heard about explained in depth.

Understanding Computation

Learn the foundations of Computer Science in Ruby.

Ruby Under a Microscope

Take a look at what makes Ruby tick, all the way down to its’ compilation.

Kestrels, Quirky Birds, and Hopeless Egocentricity

If you thought that Metaprogramming Ruby was trippy, stay away. This book covers functional combinators in depth in Ruby and gives you a view of what lambdas can really do. Not for the faint of heart, this book has some incredible ideas and writing.

Testing

RSpec

One of the most popular testing frameworks in Ruby

[OLD] The RSPEC Book

The traditional standard in RSPEC, and for good reason.

Effective Testing with RSpec

Written by one of the writers of RSpec and probably the best book on testing out on the market currently.

Minitest

Minitest is a lightweight alternative to RSpec

The Minitest Cookbook

A detailed guide on getting started with and using Minitest effectively