From: John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@...>
Date: 2007-09-05T05:56:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Programming Ruby For Newbies

Like all books, many publishers' quality varies within a series from  
title to title though the covers look similar.
Luckily, with Ruby, almost all the books are very very good.
If you want to learn Rails at some point, you want to get the book  
from Sitepoint or the Friends of Ed book. They're both pretty good to  
people new at programming and new at Ruby and new at web applications.
David Black's book is excellent for it's incredible and unique Ruby  
insights, but it's approach to Rails is a bit out of date. That said,  
it's still a very good book that should be in your Ruby library. It's  
just too bad that the middle section dedicated to Ruby isn't  
rewritten and bound as a purely Ruby book.
You'll see his posts here FREQUENTLY. David's posts are always worth  
reading, no matter what you're doing with Ruby.
But you will see a whole host of names of people who post here  
regularly that also have lots of insight and are very helpful.

Don't hesitate to visit the web sites of books and their authors.  
Ruby and Rails authors are nice people and will actually respond to  
you and try to help you if they can.