From: "Zachary P. Landau" <kapheine@...>
Date: 2004-03-23T03:21:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Need some advice on PickAxe II

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> What would make me happy, is if you removed the entire library section
> (especially things like, in your example sl.pdf, you document base64.rb,
> but thats a fairly useless set of two single line wrappers around
> pack/unpack that should never have been in the global namespace, why
> spend a whole page on it?).
>=20
> In its place, if you put a chapter on racc, on rexml, on webrick, on
> soap4r, etc., tutorial style stuff on how to do useful things, that's
> the kind of thing that I don't know will get done in the std lib
> documentation, and I would be happy to buy and be able to read on my
> couch, whereas it looks like the doc team (yeah team!) are doing good
> work in getting the per-API docs in better shape.
>=20

I'm not sure I agree with this. Programming Ruby fits very well as an
introduction (and then reference) to the language itself. I think having
in-depth examples of how to use libraries is a job for another book
(I haven't snagged a copy yet, but it seems that Hal's 'The Ruby Way'
was made for this purpose). Programming Ruby should merely mention what
exists and then point the reader to the place to get more information.

--
Zachary P. Landau <kapheine@hypa.net>
GPG: gpg --recv-key 0x24E5AD99 | http://kapheine.hypa.net/kapheine.asc

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