Guide to Further Resources

There are a wealth of Rails resources in stores and on the web—indeed, the supply is so rich that it can be overwhelming. The good news is that, having gotten this far, you’re ready for almost anything else out there. Here are some suggestions for further learning:

• The Rails Tutorial screencasts: I have prepared a full-length screencast course based on this book. In addition to covering all the material in the book, the screencasts are filled with tips, tricks, and the kind of see-how-it’s-done demos that are hard to capture in print. They are available for purchase through the Rails Tutorial website. (Note: The screencasts for the second edition are currently in preparation. They will be a paid upgrade, but current customers will receive a substantial discount.)
• RailsCasts: It’s hard to overemphasize what a great resource the RailsCasts are. I suggest starting by visiting the RailsCasts episode archive and clicking on subjects that catch your eye.
• Scaling Rails: One topic we’ve hardly covered in the Rails Tutorial book is performance, optimization, and scaling. Luckily, most sites will never run into serious scaling issues, and using anything beyond plain Rails is probably premature optimization. If you do run into performance issues, the Scaling Rails series from Gregg Pollack of Envy Labs is a good place to start. I also recommend investigating the site monitoring applications Scout and New Relic.16 And, as you might suspect by now, there are RailsCasts on many scaling subjects, including profiling, caching, and background jobs.
• Ruby and Rails books: As mentioned in Chapter 1, I recommend Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper, The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David A. Black, and The Ruby Way by Hal Fulton for further Ruby learning, and The Rails 3 Way by Obie Fernandez and Rails 3 in Action (wait for the second edition) by Ryan Bigg and Yehuda Katz for more about Rails.
• PeepCode and Code School: The screencasts at PeepCode and interactive courses at Code School are consistently high-quality, and I warmly recommend them.