Recommendations
An amazingly comfortable laptop backpack, the Alienware Orion backpack will easily handle your 17" laptop. As heavy as the Alienwares are, you will not notice their weight with this backpack. The backpack is TSA-friendly, so you just unzip the laptop compartment, fully open it, and pass it through the X-ray machine without removing the laptop!
Hands-down the best book describing techniques for writing scalable, maintainable object oriented code.
A most excellent and complete tutorial on getting up to speed on Ruby on Rails 3. Hartl doesn't miss any steps in explaining the basics of all the various parts of a Rails project. Especially useful if migrating from Rails 2 to Rails 3.
Makes a good case for small-team development with emphasis on quality rather than excessive feature sets.