Ruby: David A. Black - The Well-Grounded Rubyist - http://www.amazon.com/Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/dp/1...

Great both for people new to the language and those looking to strengthen their foundations.

I can give you my personal path I took when learning a few years ago if you don't mind starting with rails.

Start with Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial [1]. I went through the rails 3 version with zero knowledge of ruby and you should feel very comfortable with the basics when you are done.

After that I read The Well-Grounded Rubyist [2]. Having used some ruby now I found the book easy to get into. It's a little dated but should still cover everything you need at this point.

Lastly I read Eloquent Ruby [3]. I highly recommend this book and is easily my favorite programing book.

[1] http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/dp/1...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Professio...

Honestly, if you're planning on focusing on Rails eventually, I'd start with the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl (http://ruby.railstutorial.org). It's easy to get lost as a total beginner with all the various things Ruby itself is capable of, when you might have better results focusing on a smaller subset of the whole, at least to start. Rails tutorial also has a chapter early on (one of the first five) that contains an intro to ruby and can point you in the right direction from there.

Book-wise, you can't go wrong with The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/...) to begin with. I found it a lot more approachable than the Pickaxe book early on.

Good luck, Ruby was my first language and I learned a lot about learning programming languages from that experience.

For Ruby, check out The Well Grounded Rubyist. David Black's writing style simply delivers. http://www.amazon.com/Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/dp/1...

While you await delivery of your books, also check out Mr. Neighborly's Humble Little Ruby Book. It's a solid introduction to Ruby. http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/book/html/index.html

Download the Ruby Koans. All you need to do is run "ruby path_to_enlightenment.rb" from the command line. It'll tell you what line number in what file you need to change to complete each step. It's up to you to come up with the solution. There are 287 steps towards enlightenment. This is a great way to get "on hands" experience with and to learn a great deal about the Ruby langauge. http://rubykoans.com/

Rails starter material http://railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

Rails is such a fast moving target that keeping totally updated books on the shelves is probably just as frustrating for the book publishers as for those wanting up-to-date books.

That said, the Pragmatic Programmer's book Agile Development with Rails is a pretty good intro: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with...

But, with Rails 3 (with many changes) coming in the next few months, books are going to become outdated yet again.

As for Ruby in general, the fairly recent The Ruby Programming Language (http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Programming-Language-David-Flanag...) is a pretty good intro. David Black's The Well-Grounded Rubyist (http://www.amazon.com/Well-Grounded-Rubyist-David-Black/dp/1...) is recent, and I'm sure a great book, as his previous (Ruby for Rails) was excellent.