Even before 1.x, Rails has been pretty easy to figure out, and looking at the old documentation, apparently well-documented. There were countless tutorial-style blog posts if the API docs weren't enough. The Ruby mailing list was inundated for a long time with talk about Rails, to the point that I had to make a filter.

I'm not by any means a Rails fan, and think that even now, it feels like a PHP framework. (I have a "competing" web framework that I wrote and use whenever I have the flexibility, if you can call it a competitor; it's not actively promoted and the users number in the low single digits). But they do deserve credit for making sure that it's easy to figure out how to get things done.