As for the magic, my trick is to learn, learn, learn… No, seriously, the problems you mention are problems. In fact, if you wanna do some “non-standard-stuff” with Rails, all you can do is check out it’s source code. And sometimes the spot you’re looking for is pretty well hidden.

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. Tools will emerge to make things more transparent. Here’s one example: http://morki.ch/res/rubyrefactoring.pdf - I’m looking forward to this one.

Keep on going, dude

Had problems some time ago with the RDT/Radrails debugger (e.g. local variable view). Does it work now?

In general: I like the rails “magic”, but as a beginner I think it’s sometimes a bit intransparent (or needs a lot of further study). E.g. that belongs_to is an instance method in the API-doc, but nevertheless mixed in in the end as a class method of ActiveRecord::Base. How should You know that easily. E.g. that instance variables of the controller are available to the corresponding views. etc. Do You know about any docu explaining some of the magic? With Ruby itself I don’t have the feeling, that I do things, that hopefully work but where I don’t really understand why. Maybe it will change with more practice.