The book market is being swamped with new books. It seems like every day I discover a new announcement for an upcoming book on Ruby or Rails. Let’s see what’s currently in stock, and what’s waiting for us next year.
The first ones to start are, obviously, the Pragmatic Programmers.
-
Dave Thomas just announced the third edition of the PickAxe which is currently in beta.
-
Earlier this week he announced the beta release of Advanced Rails Recipes.
-
Having been postponed the next due to be released is Deploying Rails Applications, written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Bruce Tate. It’s been in beta for a while, but it got along quite slowly. Supposed to be released in January 2008.
-
Rails for PHP Developers. The target audience is quite obvious, though it’s not for me.
-
FXRuby. Apparently the No. 1 choice for building GUIs with Ruby.
Apparently some of the authors of RSpec are also writing a book about Behavior-Driven Development for them.
Apress quickly became big on the Ruby/Rails bandwagon, and speaking of RSpec, they also have a book on it due in February, though it’s not officially in their catalogue yet.
Just recently they put out several books:
-
Pro Active Record. I’m still wondering how it’s possible to write an entire book on Active Record, but apparently it’s possible.
-
Practical JRuby on Rails Web 2.0 Projects. I don’t fancy the title, but I ordered this book anyway, since it’s pretty much the only one on the topic of JRuby.
-
Practical Rails Projects. Shows different aspects of Rails by using them in very different project. A nice approach compared to just developing one or two applications over the course of a book.
Upcoming books from Apress:
-
Practical Reporting with Ruby on Rails. Reporting, business intelligence, etc.
-
Scaling Rails: Building Giant Websites. I’m looking forward to this one, and I hope it won’t disappoint.
-
Agile Testing with Rails. I’m fond of agile principles and testing, but I’m rather sick of books containing “agile” in their titles, but the contents does look interesting. Written by two guys working for ThoughtWorks who obviously know their stuff.
O’Reilly already put out their share of Ruby and Rails books, but right now the queue looks rather slim.
-
Advanced Rails. Seems to cover several topics of Rails that are, well, advanced, covering topics like Meta Programming, REST, developing plug-ins, etc.
-
The Ruby Programming Language. Mats itself is writing this one together with David Flanagan (who wrote a lot of books on JavaScript). I’m not sure if it can replace the PickAxe as the most valuable Ruby book for me, but that might just be for strictly melancholic reasons, what with it being my first Ruby book.
Manning has only put out one book on Rails yet, the excellent “Ruby for Rails” by David Black. But they have some interesting stuff in the queue for 2008.
-
Ruby in Practice. This could become the mother of books on advanced Ruby topics. The topics include testing, integration, indexing, asychronous messaging and much more.
-
Flexible Rails. I can’t say much on that topic, but maybe this book will change that. Flex and Rails. Nuff said.
Addison-Wesley recently released kind of the companion book to “The Ruby Way”, a most excellent book.
-
The Rails Way. Just been released, covers a lot of Rails grounds, from basic to advanced. Should make for a nice desktop reference.
-
Design Patterns in Ruby. Though I have mixed feelings about design patterns and their overuse in the Java world, it should be interesting to read about how they can be useful in the Ruby world.
There, lots of new stuff to read for the new year. I’m sure there’s more to come, as it naturally happens with a technology on the rise. The downside is that the quality of the books becomes more and more average over time, but there’s a lot of talented people writing on these, so hopefully the Ruby/Rails book market will see more and more great books coming out in the near future.