From The Ruby Way:
This book is largely intended to answer questions of the form of "How do I…?" As such, you can expect to do a lot of skipping around. I'd be honored if everyone read every page from front to back, but I don't expect that. It's more my expectation that you will browse the table of contents in search of techniques you need or topics you find interesting.
Is there a Rails book like this?
Okay this is probably too easy, but I'm a big fan of Obie Fernandez's The Rails Way.
I've been a core contributor to Rails for a couple years now and I tend to stay pretty up to date with what's going on, so I haven't really followed recent developments in books. Even though there have been massive changes since Rails 2.0, I would expect that The Rails Way is probably still the most complete Rails reference out there. I'd say you're better off with that book and then catching up via Ryan's Scraps or the Official Blog
Agile Web Development with Rails, It's a nice book where you can jump pretty much around.
Read the first 150 pages or so, and then started coding for my self. No experience from RoR or Ruby, but have used PHP and some Python etc before I started playing with RoR.
You want something like the Rails Cookbook.. Unfortunately it's woefully out of date. Printed while Rails 2.0 was considered EDGE Rails, and the standard was Rails 1.2. A lot of it's concepts are still useful. But most of the examples themselves are obsoleted. Usually that just means there are better convenience methods available for doing things. But every so often it means an example will not run as printed.
I don't know of any books like it that have been published about Rails 2.x.y
I'll second the recommendation for The Rails Way, with a qualifier. I find it to be incredibly valuable but maybe more of an inverse of the original question: instead of showing "how do I do that", it's more like "what can I do with that". If you have a rough idea of which part of Rails you need to use, this is the place to learn how to use it.
I browse it all the time looking at features that I'm not too clear on, just to see a good explanation combined with interesting examples that go beyond definitions. Many times I've browsed through it and discovered ways of improving my code, or come up with ideas for new features I can add easily to my applications using Rails features I didn't realize existed. (Big example: all the wonderful little tools inside ActiveSupport)
I wouldn't go for a book in the first place, i'd start working around the official Rails guides. They are updated frequently and are very simple to understand.
Although some people might want something like a "Let's create an app together" book, i think that the guides are a very good start for new comers.