I agree that the large body of documentation can be a bit overwhelming before you get into the loop of knowing where to find what (what’s Ruby and what’s Rails, for example).

Thankfully, a good number of commercial projects are trying to remedy this in large parts through the books coming out. You may want to pick up the Agile Web Development with Rails book that’s already out as a beta PDF. It makes getting up to speed much faster.

The trouble you’re experiencing with attributes is exactly as you describe an issue of knowing the evaluation order in Ruby. And knowing when you can leave out information and when you can’t. Calling attributes (and not self.attributes) works because there’s no local variable defined in the scope that takes precedence. So in essence, it works as a shortcut to calling self.attributes() or even just attributes().

Regarding good file navigation, you may consider an editor with good support for that and tabs. On OS X, a lot of people are finding TextMate very helpful for that. It has a bunch of support for Ruby and Rails as well in terms of macros and snippets.

Hopefully you’ll stick to it long enough to climb the first hill. Once you do, the view will be breathtaking.