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.

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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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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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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Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide

Would you like to go from first idea to working code much, much faster? Do you currently spend more time satisfying the compiler instead of your clients or end users? Are you frustrated with demanding languages that seem to get in your way, instead of getting the work done? Are you using Rails, and want to dig deeper into the underlying Ruby language? If so, then we've got a language and book …

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The Well-Grounded Rubyist

The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Second Edition is a beautifully written tutorial that begins with your first Ruby program and goes on to explore sophisticated topics like callable objects, reflection, and threading. The book concentrates on the language, preparing you to use Ruby in any way you choose. This second edition includes coverage of new Ruby features such as keyword arguments, lazy enumer…

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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.

Effective Testing with RSpec 3: Build Ruby Apps with Confidence

Start by learning the basics of installing and using RSpec. Then build a real-world JSON API, using RSpec throughout the process to drive a BDD-style outside-in workflow. Apply an effective test strategy to write fast, robust tests that support evolutionary design through refactoring. The rest of the book provides the definitive guide to RSpec's components. Use rspec-core's metadata to slice a…

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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…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

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

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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Component-Based Rails Applications: Large Domains Under Control (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

Use Components to Improve Maintainability, Reduce Complexity, and Accelerate Testing in Large Rails Applications
“This book gives Ruby pros a comprehensive guide for increasing the sophistication of their designs, without having to forsake the principles of elegance that keep them in our corner of the software world.”
–Obie Fernandez, author, The RailsTM 5 Way, Fourth Edition
As Rails…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

Ruby Cookbook

Recipes for Object Oriented Scripting

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This list is curated by MentorCruise and can include Amazon affiliate links. Have any other suggestions? Add here.

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