I totally binged on the DAS screencasts. Then when I had trouble implementing anything, I'd go re-watch the relevant vids.
The reason I mention experience is because Ruby itself has a lot of convention that you only get really fluent with through repeated exposure. Just now I went and browsed to a random Active Record source file and had no trouble figuring out what was going on just looking at the source.
A year ago I would have been lost like you. But now I can take individual pieces of a big codebase and grok them without having to understand the rest of it. You only get that fluency through experience.
The reason I mention experience is because Ruby itself has a lot of convention that you only get really fluent with through repeated exposure. Just now I went and browsed to a random Active Record source file and had no trouble figuring out what was going on just looking at the source.
A year ago I would have been lost like you. But now I can take individual pieces of a big codebase and grok them without having to understand the rest of it. You only get that fluency through experience.