Question

What’s the best Ruby documentation resource?

Some things I’m looking for:

• Offline
• Easy to keep up-to-date
• CLI support and fast
• Good for reference AND for browsing and learning new things
• Vim integration would be nice but not necessary
• Bonus if it covers Rails too

Coming from C on Unix, I really like the man page format and interface. Something like that would be ideal.

I like the PHP documentation for similar reasons. http://php.net/foo I find similar to man foo: synopsis up front, plus more info, examples and links to related calls on the same page.

The documentation I’ve found for Ruby so far has all been big framed HTML sites that are great for reference — I particularly like how you can dig down to the source for just about anything — but I dislike using the browser and I don’t find these interfaces very good for discovery.

Answer 1

Check out the ri tool. eg.

ri Array#sort

With output:

------------------------------------------------------------- Array#sort
 array.sort                   -> an_array 
 array.sort {| a,b | block }  -> an_array 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Returns a new array created by sorting _self_. ...