Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of The Ruby Way back in January. I was never asked to write a review. I decided to blog about it because after six months it continues to help me do my work. I now routinely recommend this book people to people I know.

Brian and I like to say that if you really want to get good at Rails, you have to get good at Ruby. The question becomes, how do you get good at Ruby? You write code, you read other people's code, and you read books. And maybe the occasional blog :-)

Back in January I got a copy of The Ruby Way, 2nd Edition by Hal Fulton. I was intending to write a review of it back then, but we were in the last moments of preparing for our Web Developer Makeover class. And I've been behind ever since. So today I finally start catching up.

If you see this book at a bookstore, you might be intimidated by how thick it is. Now, I generally find that the quality of a technical book is inversely proportional to its thickness. I remember back when I was just switching from C++ to C#, there were lots of C# books that were at least two inches thick. They looked impressive from the outside. But flipping through them in the bookstore revealed a ton of full-code printouts and screenshots of every single stupid step of every Visual Studio Wizard you could run. Publishers need a certain page count to justify their prices, I guess.

So you can imagine my mild amazement when I read the Ruby Way, a two-inch thick book, that has no filler whatsoever. I mean none. This book is 700 pages of true Ruby goodness. If you want to start getting your mind to think in Ruby, you can't go wrong with this book.

I'm not even going to try to cover everything in the book, but let me summarize why The Ruby Way will be on my bookshelf for a long time.

First, the overall writing style is awesome. I find Hal's style to be very readable and easy to follow.

Second, I have learned at least one new thing from every section I've read. Whether you're a new Rails developer or you've been using Ruby for a year or two already, you will definitely learn something from every chapter.

Third, this book does not try to be all things to all people. Early on he states that this book is not a reference manual nor a beginniner's guide to the language, instead citing other sources like the PickAxe for that sort of thing. What a refreshing thing for an author to say! Most programming books feel obligated to include a few "introduction to Ruby" chapters to appeal to a wider audience and/or just inflate the page count some more. This alone makes me much more likely to recommend this book to others, since I know that their money is not being spent on a duplication of the PickAxe.

I used to say there are only two must-have books for Rails professionals: the PickAxe and AWDwR.

But now I say three.