I remember, I have a GoF book back in college about design patterns which helped me a lot with my C and C++ programming, since my jump ship to Rails I was trying to use those design patterns I learned previously, Rails is a relatively new paradigm to me, plurals, verbs, REST, DRY.. Can you give me a recommended book for Rails that I can easily understand what I previously learned back in College.
P.S. I suspect Matz knew about the GoF book, and applied it on Ruby... :-)
You shouldn't start learning framework without learning the language first. But if you feel confident you can check out "Agile Development With Ruby On Rails". Pragmatic bookshelf (my favorite) has some neat books on RoR development too.
Topics such as REST, DRY etc are not really in the same category as the patterns covered by the Gang of Four. There is a book, Design Patterns in Ruby which you might find useful as it covers how the original GoF patterns apply in Ruby. However, once you start programming in dynamic languages like Ruby you often find you don't need patterns in same the same way as you did in languages like C++ and Java.
I would also take a look at The Ruby Way (for general Ruby programming), Agile Web Development with Rails (for a good introduction to Rails) and The Pragmatic Programmer (which covers many of the general practices such as Don't Repeat Yourself.)