I received my hardcopy of Agile Web Development with Rails a few days ago and it's definitely worth every single dime.

It's so much fun to get intimate with a technology without a learning curve! There's no need to be familiar with half a dozen APIs and application server architecture to get a clue about what is going on under the hood. You don't have to look up a new acronym or industry buzzword every couple of lines. The numerous examples won't overflow your short-term memory buffer with symbol declarations, crossreferences through useless indirection levels. I think every Java web framework user should skim through the tutorial part of this book, just to see how bad things have turned in an Enterprise world where the exceptional 5% make the other 95% totally unbearable.