Hacker News Reader

Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Am I too dumb to find it or do the Ruby docs not contain a description of the language?

https://ruby-doc.org/3.2.2/ only seems to contain API docs.

This is not an official documentation site.

The only official Ruby documentation exists at https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/ and is generated via the Ruby source code itself.

The excellent Colby Swandale has been working on a new open source alternative for Ruby documentation considering the design shortcomings of the default generated API documentation with https://rubyapi.org which I highly recommend.

If you're coming at Ruby from another language, the official Ruby site offers https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-l... and other documentation aside from API concerns here: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

Hope that helps.

I feel fooled, I've always thought https://ruby-doc.org was the official website!

Sadly there are a lot of third-party operated documentation sites that exist likely because of how hard-to-discover the official API documentation site is. It's something the community would like to address, but given the amount of link equity a lot of these older and often unmaintained doc sites have acquired it's fairly tricky.

It’s actually linked from the official site: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

That's the Core reference guide. You might want the book "Programming Ruby"[1], which is linked on the documentation landing page[2]. Alternatively, for a quick overview, I recommend Learn X in Y Minutes[3].

[1]: http://ruby-doc.com/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

[2]: https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/

[3]: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/ruby/

From [1] > This book documents Version 1.6 of Ruby

Has nothing about the language changed since 1.6?

Hah yeah, uh, make sure you get a more recent edition that was published less than 20 years ago. A profound amount has changed since then.

Looks like the 5th edition covers v3.2.

The Ruby docs are, generally, the weak spot of the language (moreso than even being slow, on which there is also more progress).

Fortunately (while there was a long time where this was not the case), there is a reasonably current version of the “Pickaxe” book, which is the closest existing thing to the documentation Ruby should have: https://pragprog.com/titles/ruby5/programming-ruby-3-2-5th-e...

You need to take a closer look at the Pages sidebard, there is for example this https://ruby-doc.org/3.2.2/syntax/pattern_matching_rdoc.html

Did you expect something else? The way I get to that link is to go to ruby-doc.org and click on "Complete API docs for Ruby 3.2.2". API docs is what I expected.

The rules for one of my favorite games says that it can only be experienced, not explained. I see that Ruby has the same philosophy.

Yeah, ruby is a weird one. They have excellent documentation of the API, but all the language documentation is wildly out of date. The main web site links to an old version of "Programming Ruby" which covers 1.6. Has nothing changed about the language in 20 years?

I find ruby-doc.org very poorly designed.

There is an unofficial website with a better design, https://ruby-docs.org

The Ruby docs are incredibly difficult to navigate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com