[LRUG] Ruby world and documentation

[Jon Wood]

Hi,

rubydoc.info can generate API documentation for any gem on rubygems.org, and provides a nice search when you know more or less what you're looking for.

Jon

On 24 Nov 2011, at 15:07, Peter Vrabel wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> a bit of introduction at the beginning. I've got C++, Unix background, doing system level programming, but I'd been using Ruby to create various internal tools, but I never got deeper into it, until recently. I'm just finishing the first milestone doing remote API for a web community portal. I use Zeromq and Google Protocol Buffers to scale it well (with bunch of other gems, like Sinatra, rest-client, ...). I've learnt a lot about Ruby during this, getting into using it idiomatically and I really like it.
> 
> My observation and question is about libraries/gems documentation. I'm  finding myself quite often reading gems code just to understand, how can I use it. Mostly, they've got s simple introduction in README and then you're on your own. But I am used to having a comprehensive reference documentation/manual, as that's what you've got in C++, Unix world. You can read about 'corner cases' which would otherwise slip by your attention. For example that you can get value 60, sometime 61 for seconds when getting current timestamp. So called 'leap seconds'. In Ruby, documentation seems to me 'more shallow'. Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's bad. It probably comes with the fact, that Ruby is easy to pick up and just to do your work. I definitely learn when reading others code (obviously ;). I would just like to hear what other folks think about it and go about it. And is there any handy application that show, search installed gems documentation apart from a command line 'ri'?
> 
> Thanks a lot.
> 
> Cheers,
>  kybu
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