An article I wrote for DotNetSlackers on Ruby Shoes just got published. Shoes is a little framework a colleague turned me onto - it's for building cross platform desktop applications on Ruby. I'm not sure its quite ready for prime time, but I do think its a far better way to learn Ruby with respect to something like Rails. Rails is just too complicated and leaks too much to serve as a good learning tool.

Shoes also has a crazy manual that's completely out there. It almost reads like a bed time story (the first 20 pages are pretty fluff though and can easily be skipped) yet still manages to act as a good introduction and reference manual. Its comparing apples to oranges, but the Shoes manual is now my favorite programming reference (overtaking The C Programming Language).

Oh, and since we're talking about programming books, the Dragon Book has always been very very low on my list...