Ive actually found rulebooks for other games to be invaluable tools when designing my own games, these come in various forms, some are actually more guides to playing the games, some are how to play (not how to win) and others can be almost direct design documents. The trick Ive found is seperate structure from the actual data, its the structure you can manipulate to fit your own systems and then develop on your own data sets. Even simple things like looking at the rules for poker, chess or many other games, such as the original concepts of capture the flag can help.
My best suggestion is do what works for you, dont ever strictly follow a guide because game design is an art and sometimes the illogical will be just the thing you need to push an idea through that hits it big. If you strictly follow a guide my fear is you would end up in clone territory rather quickly and I really do promote individuality and creativity of design and design process. Ofcoarse design process, design patterns and design theories (like iterative design) are all well documented if thats something you want to look into. I personally find its all the technical documentation and team management thats the difficult part 