[weaksauce]

I just put all the essential ones through firefox reader mode and the high end of reading them at what is what an average reader can read at based on the word count and it puts it at 10.31 hours of reading. that's a basically complete understanding of rails that most people don't have. to get 80% there you could probably skim most of them and read the main articles on models, views, and controllers and be done in a few hours. (firefox uses a somewhat naive approach though that just counts words and can't distinguish new code vs. the interesting bits so i'd wager the time is less since there is a lot of repetition in code)

it's not a ton of investment compared to how much time it would save you if you use rails later.