Sound advice. I recommend 4 books: Black's ruby for Rails and Matz's first edition in English Ruby in a Nutshell. Black's book is a great intro to exactly the

Sound advice. I recommend 4 books: Black's ruby for Rails and Matz's first edition in English Ruby in a Nutshell. Black's book is a great intro to exactly the techniques of method_missing, mixins, class_eval, #included, etc, you need to understand the world of rails source and plugins/gems. 1st edition Ruby in Nutshell covers ruby 1.6, is small enough that you can read the whole thing carefully several times. The 2nd edition, by Flanagan and Matz, is also a must-have reference, but not something you read straight through. Also recommended: the ruby/metaprogramming chapters in Ediger's "Advanced Rails" (oreilly) and Rappin's "Professional Rails" (Wrox). All excellent resources Also, for javascript/ ajax: Flanagan's JS reference, and Crockford's "JS, the Good parts"