Top Ruby books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Ruby books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Ruby

Understanding the concepts of Ruby starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

Head First Ruby: A Brain-Friendly Guide

All the buzz about this Ruby language? Is it right for you? Well, ask yourself: are you tired of all those extra declarations, keywords, and compilation steps in your other language? Do you want to be a more productive programmer? Then youâ??ll love Ruby. With this unique hands-on learning experience, youâ??ll discover how Ruby takes care of all the details for you, so you can simply have fun …

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Agile Web Development with Rails 7

Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single-page applications - at a fraction of the complexity. Rails 7 integrates the Hotwire frameworks of Stimulus and Turbo directly as the new defaults, together with that hot newness of import maps. The result is a toolkit so powerful that it allows a single indi…

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Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails

Using Rails, developers can build web applications of exceptional elegance and power. Although its remarkable capabilities have made Ruby on Rails one of the world

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Ruby Cookbook

Recipes for Object Oriented Scripting

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Learn Enough Ruby to Be Dangerous: Write Programs, Publish Gems, and Develop Sinatra Web Apps with Ruby

Programmers love Ruby for its elegance, power, and flexibility: that's why it was chosen for the Ruby on Rails framework that launched websites from Shopify to Coinbase. You'll love Ruby too, but you don't need to learn "everything" about it, just how to use it efficiently to solve real problems. In Learn Enough Ruby to Be Dangerous, renowned instructor Michael Hartl teaches the concepts, skil…

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Polished Ruby Programming: Build better software with more intuitive, maintainable, scalable, and high-performance Ruby code

Anyone striving to become an expert Ruby programmer needs to be able to write maintainable applications.
Polished Ruby Programming will help you get better at designing scalable and robust Ruby programs, so that no matter how big the codebase grows, maintaining it will be a breeze.
This book takes you on a journey through implementation approaches for many common programming situations, …

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Additional Ruby Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Ruby, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Eloquent Ruby

Eloquent Ruby starts small, answering tactical questions focused on a single statement, method, test, or bug. You'll learn how to write code that actually looks like Ruby (not Java); why Ruby has so many control structures; how to use strings, expressions, and symbols; and what dynamic typing is really good for.

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Programming Ruby 3.3: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide

Ruby is a fully object-oriented language. The combination of the power of a pure object-oriented language with the convenience of a scripting language makes Ruby a favorite tool of programmers that want to get things done quickly and cleanly.

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Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications, but with a twist... A full Rails application probably has less total code than the XML you'd need to configure the same application in other frameworks.With this book you'll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painfu…

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Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications: Discover practical design patterns for maintainable web applications

The Ruby on Rails framework boosts productivity by leveraging the convention-over-configuration principle and model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, enabling developers to build features efficiently. This initial simplicity often leads to complexity, making a well-structured codebase difficult to maintain. Written by a seasoned software engineer and award-winning contributor to many other open-s…

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Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development With Rails

Using Rails, developers can build web applications of exceptional elegance and power. Although its remarkable capabilities have made Ruby on Rails one of the world

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer

The Complete Guide to Writing More Maintainable, Manageable, Pleasing, and Powerful Ruby Applications Ruby’s widely admired ease of use has a downside: Too many Ruby and Rails applications have been created without concern for their long-term maintenance or evolution. The Web is awash in Ruby code that is now virtually impossible to change or extend. This text helps you solve that problem by u…

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