If you're using Ruby on Rails for anything, it looks like the price is to have to follow the existing community all the time, waiting for snippets.
A while ago, the complaint was "oh, but the only documentation is in a book that you have to buy". Well, I bought both the Rails and the Ruby book, and I thought they were both worth the money. Now I hear that there's a Rails in a Nutshell book on the way too …
But look more carefully; the existing books are already out-of-date. We're told that the instance variable params is now supposed to be treated as a method instead. http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/articles/2006⁄04/25/use-params-not-params
About the third comment says, basically, "OK, that's fine; but shouldn't the advice be to just use getter methods instead of instance variables all the time?"
The framework is still in flux, just being at version 1.1.2 hasn't necessarily changed that.
But hey, who cares? It works, and works well … :-)