After leaving my previous company, I decide to became a real Ruby develper. I plan to spend more spare time in Ruby, of course Rails. But I don't have any idea about how to became a better Ruby developer, as well which knowledge should I master.

At this point, I discover this book Practicing Rails writen by Justin Weiss, who is a great Ruby player.

What is the book covering?

There is a copy from justin's website:

The best way to study new Rails ideas
How do you build your own Rails app
How to test your code efficiently and effectively
Your “learning Rails” roadmap
What to do when your app stops working
Keeping up with the Rails community
Where learning Rails fits into your nonexistent free time

Actually, this book just contains about 180 pages. So it doesn't have enough capability to cover too much details of Ruby & Rails. Instead, author mentions some basic situation with tons of his personal suggestions. Just like, why will you get stuck in this case and how to overcome it.

Expensive?

The price of this book is $49. Converting to RMB is about ¥350.

EXPENSIVE was my first feeling when I saw this price. But the cool part is that author provided about 30 pages Free Sample Chapter for us. So You can read it first before purchasing the whole book. That was what I did.

After finishing the Sample Chapter, I decide to purchase the whole book. It must be a good book for no matter newbie or experienced people who want to be a better Rubyists.

Book list at the end

At the very end of the book. Author listed a series of books which are helpful to himself. In addition, he posted some thoughts and descriptions for these book. That will help readers to choose the suitable one.

Epilogue

If you want to be a good Rubyists but have no idea about what you should do next. If you want to build an application by yourself but often get stuck by all kind of things. If you want to write more tests but don't konw which part should be tested. I think this book was written for you.

As for me, is was the first English book that I can finish reading and was enjoyable for me. I highly recommend you to put this book on your TODO list.