Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It reads like it was written by an emu on acid, or maybe Douglas Adams's long-lost and insane brother. But anyway, it's a very enlightening (and light) book about ruby. I think it may have been intended for first-time programmers, but it's hard to say for sure. I find the pace is fine, and it's definitely expanding my mind and making me understand some of the different ruby syntax I've been seeing all last year.

Another thing that I missed somehow last year, is SCPlugin for Mac OS X. It's just like TortoiseSVN, except for Mac. Whoo hoo! I remember spending a lot of time last year looking for good SVN client for mac and not finding one (well, SmartSVN is survivable). I think at that point SCPlugin haven't quite made it to prime time yet. I looked again just now, and there it is.

By the way, I do all of my Rails work in oXygen. I realize that it's an XML editor primarily, and that everyone else uses TextMate but I don't like TextMate. It's too programmable. And the first time I installed it it took over every single file on my file system. oXygen is easy to use, has awesome XML/XHTML formatting tools, and I'm a dedicated CSS/XHTML hand coder.