tl;dr: I want a high-level introduction to Rails, which covers what I need to get started with proper reference materials. I don't need basic concepts explained.
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Ruby and rails both seem nice, but the documentation, although voluminous, seems to be all tutorials targeted at people who aren't that experienced as programmers or web developers, or be super-terse snippets on how to use various libraries for people who already know all about rails and ruby.
The material I'm seeing seems to be very task-oriented, which is alright if you want to follow it through without much understanding, and are able to memorise a bunch of things. I, by contrast, do not have a great memory, so I want something concise, which explains the concepts and conventions, and how they fit together. I don't need anything that "introduces" any programming concepts - I'm familiar with functional programming, late-binding, object-orientation. I'm familiar with web technologies (or at least, sufficiently so that I can learn about them). I can read code and api documentation, but I'd rather have something that lets me see the big picture first. I can look at the various resources about the language (or even better, I'd love to also look at documentation for ruby in the same vein as what I'm asking for in relation to rails).
The closest to thing I have seen to what I want is the ruby guides, but they are still very much written in a fragmented and task oriented style.
I'm not a fan of programming books (generally either too linear, becomes out of date more quickly than suites of docs maintained online), but if the best material is published in that form, so be it.
I don't think I'm that unusual in any of these respects - plenty of people know a huge bunch of stuff (a lot more than I do), don't need their hand held, but want to start exploring with a minimum of fuss.
Any suggestions?