One of the joys of being a publisher is that you get to see things early, and then watch them develop. Right now, I'm having a ball with two books. And, by coincidence, both of them are companions to Ruby books that I wrote.
Maik Schmidt's Enterprise Integration with Ruby lives up to it's title, and then some. Not only does it show you how to use Ruby to create enterprise-level applications (both standalone and by gluing together existing apps), it also does an incredible job of describing the underlying technologies. I learned a boatload about databases, LDAP, SOAP, and XML background, as well as a ton of stuff about the Ruby libraries that support these technologies. Joe O'Brien puts it well:
If you are wanting to get into Ruby development, you work in a company with more than 5 employees, and you want to see some concrete examples of how Ruby can help you in your day to day job, please purchase a copy of Enterprise Integration with Ruby along with your copy of Programming Ruby. You will not regret it.
The second book that's blowing me away is Chad Fowler's Rails Recipes. This isn't the standard "27 ways to parse a string"-style recipe book. Instead it focuses on real-life problems you face when writing an application, then shows you the full solution. And I love that, because it means I can just pick up the code and run with it. I know Rails pretty well, but each recipe in Chad's book teaches me more. Alan Francis seems to like it, too:
Run, don't walk. Go now to the PragBookshelf site and buy the Rails Recipes beta by Chad.
And the fun thing is that both of these books are great follow-ons to existing books: if you have the PickAxe, you'll probably want to get Enterprise Integration with Ruby. And if you have Agile Web Development with Rails, you'll need Rails Recipes.
It's really nice to see this kind of evolution, as books grow and build on each other. I think its a sign of the growing maturity and strength of the Ruby community. And we've got some really cool stuff under development, too...
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