Jeff Davis
1/27/2005 7:19:00 PM
I've been learning Ruby lately and I think it's a great language.
However, it takes time to figure out where the information and resources
are.
Complete documentation seems to be hard to find. The Programming Ruby
link is nice and very helpful, but it doesn't include any reference
section, and it references page numbers that I can't find (because the
pages online aren't numbered). Some reference documents exist but are
hard to find. Nothing is really searchable.
rdoc is not interactive like perl or python, and requires a path to the
actual ruby file and not just an arbitrary class name (can you rdoc a
built-in class?). It does great html output, however.
It's hard to find good documentation for the modules/classes, built-in
or otherwise.
It's also hard to find modules or classes that aren't built in. I think
I found the 'postgres' module in the RAA, but it isn't exactly an
application, it's more of a library.
I have some idea about what "gems" are but it's confusing how they fit
into the big picture.
Can someone let me know where I can find some of these resources?
It seems as though perl, python, and php have all of these things easily
accessible from the main websites. With ruby, it's very difficult to
even know what website to go to (rubyforge? runy-lang? rubycentral?
ruby-doc? raa?), and there's no clear division of responsibility that I
can see.
I really like the language and community, but perhaps the community
resources put off some of the less determined people from getting into it.
Regards,
Jeff Davis