A lot of people ask what the best Ruby books are to buy. There are plenty of good ones, but don't limit yourself to just Ruby or Rails books. There are many about general programming and software engineering topics that teach very important concepts like the Mythical Man-Month. Here's a list of books to check out:
Ruby Books
- Metaprogramming Ruby 2 - While fairly advanced, this book will help you understand the philosophy Ruby developers take when building things like Rails and ActiveRecord. Metaprogramming is a widely used tool that is the source of all the "magic" most newbies fear.
- Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby
- Effective Ruby: 48 Specific Ways to Write Better Ruby
- Eloquent Ruby
- Design Patterns in Ruby
- The Ruby Programming Language: Everything You Need To Know
- The Rails 5 Way
General Programming and Software Engineering Books
- The Mythical Man-Month
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
- Managing Humans - Even though this book is targeted at managers, this book will give you really good insight into how a well oiled engineering team should operate.