Enterprise Integration with Ruby Maik Schmidt / Pragmatic Bookshelf
OK, we're not really going to tell you about building enterprise software. I wouldn't begin to presume!

But an hour with this book this morn cleared up for me my recent intuition to learn Ruby and Rails. I get these feelings about some technologies and languages and not about others; until this morn I couldn't place exactly why Ruby draws me.

It's this: the OHP website is far from "Enterprise". But it ( along with certain of my other projects) has enterprise-like aspects. Most of these are faked through some generously open and WELL documented library of php functions or free services that together deliver the blog, forums, wiki, etc. But it's becoming apparent that keeping up will require much more code, especially on the DOM side.

Ruby gives the feeling that one can hope to pull together many code bits in the way enterprises have, without the total confusion of JAVA & Javascript libraries, frameworks, and tools that have been the case so far.

This hope may or may not mature, but that's what struck me while reading this well-crafted book.