From: Chris Cummer Date: 2007-12-18T08:38:03+09:00 Subject: Re: Language Popularity - PHP vs Ruby? On 17-Dec-07, at 3:11 PM, Michael Granger wrote: >> http://www.php.net/manual/en/ > > Does this mean you don't know about > > http://ruby-doc.org/ > or don't consider it to be "excellent, up-to-date, comprehensive > online documentation"? As someone who started using Ruby when the > only documentation was in Japanese, I find complaints about Ruby's > current supposed lack of documentation (online or otherwise) to be > surprising To be fair, much as I love Ruby the PHP world does stand head and shoulders above in terms of the quality and usability of the documentation (that AND clause is very important). The Ruby docs are likely just as _complete_ in a technical sense, but the PHP docs are so much easier to use and search than the Ruby docs are. THe PHP doc's ability to have user-contributed examples at the bottom of them is a fantastic resource, one I've taken advantage of more times than I can count. That you can search the docs from any page in the docs is also pretty nice (really, a basic requirement for online docs, in my opinion). On the Rails side of things Alex Gorbatchev has done a pretty nice job with Noobkit (http://www.noobkit.com/), again a resource I use quite frequently. That it also contains the Ruby docs is a huge boon but there's still much room for improvement. I guess if I could have one wish for ruby-doc.org it would be to allow user-contributed comments and examples ala PHP.net. There's so much useful information and examples in this mailing list and on the web that having them centralized and context-sensitive per the relevant doc page would be awesome. (My other wish would be to get rid of that three-pane top-frame approach and replace it with a comprehensive search field and decent index).