But that raises the question: Suppose you're eager to get started. How do you learn about JSF 2 before all the user-friendly books have been written?

I suggest you go about it the way I do - here's the resources that you can use now, while waiting for the books that will come out.

Read online articles and blogs: This is probably the most obvious suggestion, if you're already here - just paging backward in this blog will get you some good information. But that really only gives you a very limited set of examples.

Read the PDL docs: Here's one that surprises me - most folks don't seem to know that every standard tag is documented in the PDL Docs. While the language of these docs can be a little overspecific and dry, of all of the standard JSF documetation, I find this the most useful.

Read the JSDocs: Not a surprising is that most folks don't realize that we have a standard set of documentation for the JavaScript API for JSF. Again, it's a bit overspecific (it's written that way, in part, because it serves as formal specs in addition to docs), but it does have a lot of good information.

There's also the JavaDocs and the Spec itself, but if often difficult to find something in there unless you know what you're looking for, so instead I recommend you...

Check out the demos: Project Mojarra has a bunch of demo programs, and many of them are really, really simple examples of things you can do with JSF 2. There's also a fair bit of cruft in there, waiting for us to clean it up, but it's probably worth your while. I recommend checking out any demo with "basic" or "ajax" in it's name, as a start. To do this, of course, you'll have to check out the Project Mojarra Source Code (check in the directory marked "jsf-demo"), but that's not such a high bar - it's not necessary to build it to get something out of the demos.

And of course, most importantly:
Ask questions: There's the mail alias, webtier@dev.glassfish.java.net - which requires subscription, but you'll want to see other people's questions anyway. I promise you, the entire dev team reads that alias. There's the JSF Forum - where a lot of really savvy users hang out, helping each other. There's an IRC channel too, ##jsf at irc.freenode.net - where you'll often find folks from all over the JSF world.

So, to sum up, if you're a bit adventurous and ready to start right now, there's a lot of things that'll get you going. And the books will be along shortly, never fear.