1. Your subjective experience learning a new language is going to be up to you and how many languages you know. Ruby feels great from Java and C# to me, but maybe it won't for you.

2. The Rails guides (official) are great to learn the framework.

3. It's only relevant to learn the older versions of the framework if you're going to a company on the older versions. Realistically, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all very similar and I would argue it's more important to start with the newest stuff and focus on upgrading apps the newest version than trying to learn the older versions (not for any particular reason, other than there have been meaningful improvements in later versions).

4. The source code, contrary to popular belief, is quite well-documented, and the official guides are also very well written. A lot of the "magic" is just DSL/plumbing that exists in the actual framework. I personally keep a copy of rails/rails locally so I can look at things when I want to, because it's really that readable.

Appreciate the info, thanks.