This is my first RoR book. As a amateur web developer, I find this book perfect for learning rails. It starts off with a real world application which keeps me motivated. It covers almost all the basic aspect of rails, and if you follow through, you should be able to build decent web sites. However, since RoR is so new, and everything changes extremely fast, you can't expect this book keep pace with the new development, even though it's already written in an agile fashion. For latest RoR development, you should check out http://rubyonrails.org. While I am typing this, just found out RoR 2.0 was released today, Dec. 17, 2007. Woohoo! nice job!