Ruby Reading List
Huw Collingbourne has published a nice Recommended Ruby Reading List — it has 6 “essential books” about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, 3 “other books” about the Ruby Language and Ruby on Rails, and provides links to 4 FREE books (PDFs) about programming ruby (that you can download). for a total of 13 books about Ruby. I downloaded a bunch of the PDF books, but the only other one I own is Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide (second edition) which a lot of folks seem to agree is truly the essential book about Ruby.
Huw recommends The Ruby Way, by Hal Fulton, as the “second great tome” (after pick-axe) which is published by Addison Wesley, and is also now in it’s second edition. A free example chapter about “Working with Strings” is provided.