RoR acolytes whisper the name David Heinemeier Hansson with a passion that is not a little eery. (google "dhh" and he's at the top, wikipedia brings him right up  too). Nonetheless, the creator of RoR known for his strong opinions has some excellent, uncompromising ideas about development that are inspiring me.

I was watching the RailsConf keynote speech from 2006 (I'm a little behind the times, sure, but this stuff was way ahead of it's own time methinks) and DHH made a statement that I really thought well encapsulated what I like about RoR:

"If you have the initial assumption that things should be able to be done by hand without leaving you crying, it leads to better design." 

In context he was speaking about REST and how adding additional methods to your controller may be easy, but it becomes messy and you should ask yourself why you are adding those additional methods. If you adopt the constraints of REST (giving you essentially 7 methods for CRUD operations in the controller), and you do not let yourself easily tag addt'l methods on the controller, you'll learn something about your design and a more simple solution will present itself. 

He contrasts this approach against other frameworks that have become heavily dependent on IDEs in order to facilitate development. He likes to pick on java, but nobody is really safe from his barbs.

Checkout the keynote if for no other reason than to gain a great understanding of REST. Other books I've read recently and highly recommend:

Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 by Peter Armstrong
The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez (and others)
Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas & DHH