From: Marvin Humphrey <marvin@...>
Date: 2010-02-14T00:25:46+09:00
Subject: Getting started with the C API

Greets,

I've been teaching myself Ruby using David Black's book, "The
Well-Grounded Rubyist".  5 chapters in or so, things are going well.
However, things would be going even better if I was able to get
started on the project that's motivating my course of study: there's a
C library I'd like to write Ruby bindings for.

The Black book, while appropriate in pace and tone for an experienced
programmer, doesn't cover any sort of Ruby C API.  The pickaxe book
does, but before I go and buy a copy of that, I'd like to know if
those pickaxe chapters are really the canonical reference.  That seems
weird.

What I'm looking for is the analogue to these pages:

  http://perldoc.perl.org/perlxstut.html
  http://docs.python.org/3.1/c-api/index.html
  http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jni/html/jniTOC.html

From what I can tell, the closest thing Ruby has to that is a raw
Doxygen dump...

  http://www.ruby-doc.org/doxygen/current/

... but that's not much better than just spelunking the source code,
because it doesn't give you any idea where to get started.

I know the first edition of the pickaxe book is online, but I don't
like to waste time learning from dated materials.

Where should I be looking?

Marvin Humphrey