From: Stefan Lang <langstefan@...>
Date: 2004-12-03T20:59:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby documentation.

Am Freitag, 3. Dezember 2004 02:50 schrieb Adam Fabian:
> I'm kind of getting the impression that Ruby might not be
> well-documented in English.  I'm looking for a primary language to
> pick up as a hobby (with, perhaps, as a bonus, some modicum of useful
> applicability for the system administration I do), and from what I've
> read of Programming Ruby online, I really like the syntax and design
> and everything.  On the other hand, I'm a sucker for good
> documentation.  Perl's syntax is frankly, in my humble opinion, ugly
> and inscrutable, but it's certainly well-documented! ;)

I have got books for Perl in English and German (my native language) but
it took me at about one month to understand most of Perl's syntax,
built-in operators, file handling etc.
And even now, I often have to look up documentation because
I can't remember exactly how I have to dereference correctly
a hash(ref) in an hash in an array......

I startet learning Ruby about 10 days ago and I must admit,
I am faster in writing Ruby code than Perl code, make less
mistakes and I also understand more Ruby code written by others
than Perl code.

I started with the online version of the "Pragmatic Programmer's Guide":
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

> So, what's the Ruby experience like for a native English speaker with
> no knowledge of Japanese and no inclination to read the Ruby source to
> figure out how things work?

See above. My native language is German, but I learned only from
English docs.

Documentation of some standard modules could be better, like e.g. REXML,
but perhaps I haven't looked at the right places for it...

--
Stefan