O’Reilly has launched their Rough Cuts series with Ruby on Rails: Up and running as one of the first titles leading the charge. Rough Cuts is O’Reilly’s version of Beta Books or Early Access and gives you access to the content while it’s still being written.

Ruby on Rails: Up and running is written by Bruce Tate and Curt Hibbs. The final book is expected in May. Also of note for Railers on Rough Cut is Ruby Cookbook by Leonard Richardson and Lucas Carlson. That one is expected done in September. Not to be confused with the Rails Recipes by Chad Fowler (featuring recipes and secrets from the 37signals dome) that’ll be out in February.

So that marks four books currently available in final or beta form that focuses exclusively or partly on Rails: Agile Web Development with Rails (the original bible), Rapid Web Development mit Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Rails: Up and running, and Ruby Cookbook. That’s quite an achievement already!

And coming soon will be Chad Fowler’s Rails Recipes and David A. Black’s Ruby for Rails, which will bring us to a total of six books. And I believe there’s at least a good handful of additional books in the works. Rails is certainly on track to be the best documented web framework for the dynamic languages. Rock on.