Beginner Books

• Agile Web Development with Rails Edition 3
• Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz

Advanced Books

• Advanced Rails Recipes: 84 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps, by Mike Clark
• The Rails Way
• The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton

Free eBooks

http://freecomputerbooks.com/langRubyBooks.html

But, I would also suggest you check out these other free resources which keeps up to date with the technology.

Screencasts and Podcasts

• Railscasts by Ryan Bates – http://www.railscasts.com
• Learning Rails – http://www.buildingwebapps.com/podcasts
• Peepcode Screencasts – http://www.peepcode.com

Learning Sites

Ruby Learning Hub – http://www.rubylearning.org/class/ by Satish Talim. They have a lot of free courses on various subjects but one should do the Ruby course first.

Magazines

Rails Magazine – www.railsmagazine.com

Top Blogs

• http://www.loudthinking.com/ by David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Rails)
• http://www.rubyinside.com/ by Peter Cooper.
• http://mephistoblog.com/ by Rick Olson and Justin Palmer
• http://hivelogic.com/ by Dan Benjamin
• http://redhanded.hobix.com/ by _why the lucky stiff
• http://nubyonrails.com/ by Geoffrey Grosenbach
• http://errtheblog.com by PJ Hyett and Chris Wanstrath
• http://www.slash7.com by Amy Hoy
• http://weblog.rubyonrails.org by the Rails core team
• http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/ by Jamis Buck
• http://www.railsenvy.com/ by Gregg Pollack

Sitepoint has an offer to download the PDF version of Patrick Lenz’s book. I downloaded the book last week and have already read 351 of 464 pages. I am on Chapter 11 of 12. finished reading it now. It is a nicely written book and covers a lot of ground. It is very easy to understand & follow and I would recommend it to any newbie on Ruby on Rails. It is also a nice midway book between Agile Web Development with RoR 1st Edition and the recently released 2nd Edition.

It has one chapter each on debugging and deployment, which most books do not cover. It has a chapter each dedicated to introducing Ruby and Rails separately. The part I liked the most was that the book has been written from a developer’s perspective. It not only “educates” but teaches the reader how to program using the Ruby on Rails platform. It follows a standard / recommended path to write the sample application. E.g. a chapter would introduce a concept, make you write some code, see it executing, then come back and write tests to make sure the code is testable for later. It also uses migrations throughout to teach the reader the right way to do the job. This in my point of view instills good habits in a newbie which will help in the longer run. The book also comes with source code but I enjoyed building the sample application “shovell” following the book’s narrative.