I still feel stupid--where is the generate script documented? posted by Bharat Ruparel @ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:23:57 +0000

Brian,
You may want to look at the Advanced Rails Recipes book. As I am beginning to program in Rails professionally, I find myself turning more frequently to the Rails Way, Advanced Rails Recipes, and Agile Web Development (particularly the later in-depth chapters on Active Records for example).
But I understand your frustration. There does not seem to be a smooth transition from knowing and learning basic material to the real world professional material in general. Chad Fowler’s Rails Recipes book is pretty good too, but is a bit outdated. Yet another book that I found that helps answer some of the questions like you are asking is David Black’s Ruby for Rails Developers, highly recommended but a bit obsolete. That is the nature of the beast. Rails moves too fast and you can more comfortably keep up after you acquire some “how to fish” skills.
My approach has been to read and hack widely and then dive-in. I find myself using Google extensively to research more specific questions, so Google is an indispensible tool. If you get to maintain the code written by more experience Rails developers then it can be both a very frustrating but a very quick ramp up to knowing Rails at the same time. You will have quite a few highs and lows though.
Hope this helps.
Bharat