The routing system and associated view helpers can really get confusing.

For example:

    link_to @story.title, @story

You have to know that rails has some automatic routing based on the class of an object. If @story is a Story class, rails basically does this underneath:

    link_to @story.title, send("#{@story.class.name.downcase}_path".to_sym, @story.to_param)

There's implicit conversion of class names going on under the hood in a few places. It's all documented but it's not easy to find the documentation when you don't know what you are looking for.

The thing that really screws up people starting with rails is not understanding the various layers (html, views, controllers, models, http, etc.) and how rails puts those together. If you don't know how to do web programming with basic html and php, rails will eat you alive with it's seemingly magical behaviors.