I've been through most of the rails books, at least partway, and none of them is a great programming book. The classic, AWDWR from pragmatic programmers is a b

I've been through most of the rails books, at least partway, and none of them is a great programming book. The classic, AWDWR from pragmatic programmers is a bit out of date, otherwise I would recommend it. The "Rails in depth" chapters there are quite useful and could be taken out and used as a reference. "The Rails Way" is a good book but the online version requires Adobe Digital Editions for the DRM and that interface is a pig. This book is clearly not intended as a first book on Rails, but you'll end up buying it if you do more than one project. There's supposed to be a new version coming out soon, so check out the date of publication. I started Rails as one project of many, but I don't think that pollutes my fundamental finding: Learn Ruby First. In fact I'd like to put together a book of small Ruby tasks and samples to cover the language. The existing books are narrative-based. The secret question for all Rails developers is: Should I learn the framework by looking at the source? Or should I code by reading the API docs? I started out as an old-fashioned software-is-a-contract guy and tried to build code by following the docs. The docs aren't good enough. The site 'api.rubyonrails.org' has docs that include source, lacking only an on-screen search box. Finally, a good IDE that indexes the rails source (and your source) to produce a sort of visual-etags would be very useful. I haven't found one I like. That is, I would like to click on my call to 'number_to_currency' and have it bring up the source code in another window frame. I haven't found a solution I like.