There are indeed details that one will end up needing to simply remember or need to look up. And if there’s anything thing in this world I can speak to, it’s how to look things up regarding Inform. Victor’s corpus demonstrates that he has it sorted, but for the edification of any whom it might help…
The single most valuable resource I know is Inform 7 documentation and resources. Since I actively curate it, this is tautology: when I think I know a way to make it more valuable, I change it. Admittedly, it is very long and very dense. However, everything below and much more can be found therein.
The best places for looking up particular phrases are the documentation’s General Index and the Project Index’s Phrasebook.
In the General Index, phrases are sorted according to their first word, e.g., (arithmetic value) times (arithmetic value) is placed under T for times. If you’re unsure of the first word, the alphabetization won’t help, but you can search the text for any word you do remember.
The General Index only offers phrases from the built-in extensions. The Project Index, however, is custom-made for your project every time you build it, so it reflects whatever extensions you may have included as well as whatever you’ve specified in your own code. It groups phrases according to origin, reflecting the order in which the compiler encountered their definitions. Since it’s legitimate to override phrases, it offers an opportunity to sanity-check that you’re not inadvertently getting a different version of a phrase than you expected.
For the sequence of rulebooks within an action, WI chapter 7: Basic Actions is basic indeed and doesn’t even mention Check, Carry out, or Report rules. WI 12.2: How Actions Are Processed includes a helpful flowchart illustrating the order, but the table at the end of Jim Aikin’s Inform Handbook is invaluable and helpfully includes the details regarding which rulebooks stop the action by default. If you crave minutiae, consult Action Processing’s gory details.
A closely related topic, that which often inspires checking the rulebook order is when to use which action rulebooks?, wherein I grind my Don’t just put everything in Instead rules axe.
If you want to customize the built-in actions’ behaviors, you need to know what they are and when they do what, and there’s no more authoritative source than the Standard Rules for Actions themselves. Chairman Otis helpfully annotates them in the Standard Rules Action Reference.
Another resource of broad utility is the search page of my I7 docs web remix which offers the whole texts of both Writing with Inform and The Inform Recipe Book on a single page so that you can search the docs within your browser.