bangmyhead.com

A Good Rails Book

I started with a great rails book called Building a social networking website with Ruby on Rails. The title is a little mis-leading. Although the theme is around a social networking site, the book concentrates on the basic skills you will need to build any database backed website. This book is great for anyone new to Rails. It is concise, practical and covers Rails 2, REST, Authenication, RJS, emails, testing.

API

If you want to view the Rails API online, the Official Ruby On Rails API is not as user friendly as the AJAX enhanced API.

You can also download the CHM Documentation, or set up RDoc and ri documentation (see next section).

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# You can download the latest docs from here.
wget -r -w 1 http://api.rubyonrails.com

RDoc and ri

"RDoc is the embedded documentation generator for the Ruby programming language. It analyzes the Ruby source code, generating a structured collection of pages for Ruby objects and methods.... RDoc also provides the engine for creating Ruby ri data files. ri is (more or less) Ruby's version of man pages, serving up API information from the command line." wikipedia.org

Free Ruby Book

To be good at rails you are going to need a good understanding of ruby, so check out this free online book, Programming Ruby

Free Screencasts

rubyplus.org

So far I've only seen one screencast from here, but it was very helpful. This screencast Contact Us Feature using Rails 2.0 explains the code Simply Rich Authenticator, which is a default Rails application with a contact form using RESTful concepts.

railscasts.com

Lots of great rails tips! Don't forget to check out the ones your not interested in as well, because they may contain hidden gems.

Howto's

There are some Howto's on the rails wiki which I didn't find straight away.