When people ask me how to improve their programming this is my first advice - speed read docs/stdlib top to bottom and keep writing a lot of little things. It’s amazing how many people choose painful path of learning through osmosis.
This is a ludicrous approach for most. Sure, if you learn from reading and love to read technical manuals, go for it. But to imply this is the best way for most to learn is completely ridiculous.
It really doesn't take more than a few seconds to figure out why your analogy of learning a language by reading a dictionary written in that language is both stupid and inapplicable here, so I'm not going to try to further address that aspect of your comment (especially since you don't seem inclined to directly respond to anything in my comment).
I’ve been surrounded by so many rails fans who use it for every possible problem. “If all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail” was the epitome of what was happening. Then being left with trying to sift through old versions of documentation, trying to figure out what is the “current” way of doing things in rails vs the previous ways, aye yi yi. Rails has definitely left me with a sour taste in my mouth.
I’m not saying rails is bad, it is great in so many situations. I’m just saying it is not a silver bullet, and the cult behind it has some real blinders on.
I stand by my original argument though that for most people, reading documentation top to bottom isn’t the best way to learn. If it works for you, great.
Not once did I read a textbook front to back.
there are about 35 guides in the rails guide list and half of those are digging deep into the framework... reading the first 10 of them would get you about 95% of what you really need to know in rails so that you can look up stuff later. hell even just doing the getting started guide walks you through a fairly complete rails application.
i'm working (slowly) on a personal project in rails 7 using all the hotwire with importmaps newness, and so far, it's been so much better than recent rails' diversion into all that node/yarn/webpacker mess.
it's not a ton of investment compared to how much time it would save you if you use rails later.