Righteous Ruby Resources

Herein is a collection of helpful people, high-signal/low-noise information, and useful tools from the Ruby ecosystem.

I only include the resources from which I've personally gotten benefit.

Programmers

(sort order: most directly influential to me, descending)

• Corey Haines — hacker-at-large, Corey travels around the world, coding for room and board.  Also, he's an amazing programmer's coach/instructor.  Corey co-invented and runs Code Retreats.
• Jörg W Mittag [github] — a top contributor at StackOverflow, Jörg is a language nerd and hacker-at-heart.
• James Edward Gray II (@JEG2) [github][twitter] — He's also a regular conference speaker and co-host on the Ruby Rogues podcast. James is an incurable optimist and accomplished Rails programmer.
• Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) [github][blog] — a committer to both Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

Books & Online References

• RubyMonk — if you want to really learn, you learn by doing.  This website is a set of tutorials on Ruby (and some nascent work on including Rails) that are fantastic in both explanation and that you run snippets of Ruby right there.
• Rebuilding Rails by Noah Gibbs — learn how a car works by building one.
• Ruby Toolbox — amazing resource for discovering what 3rd party gems are currently popular.  In effect, his directory acts as a secondary "standard library".
• Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas (with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt) — the "Pickaxe Book". Very handy reference and rather complete. This is the place to start for the narratives on using the language.

Blogs & Podcasts

• Ruby Rogues — Charles Max Wood is a consummate programmer+podcaster. He's surrounded himself with smart articulate people. It's episode after episode of rich informative discussion.

Tools

• TextMate — a powerful text editor. TextMate provides a pleasant Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails editing experience.
• git — there are many VCS repositories, but this one is mine. git is a programmers' best friend