Ruby onboard documentation disappointment

Ruby
1

As installed on Debian 7.3, ri is useless, even with running rdoc in /usr/lib/ruby. Following a recomendation found online I installed the source tree and ran rdoc over that using this command:
mike@/deb73:~/tmp/ruby-1.9.3-p551> rdoc -a -w4 -t’Ruby_1.9.3’
-op /mc/docs/computer/programming/ruby/rdoc/ ./*
When I tried the ‘-r’ switch rdoc said html was already selected and did nothing but after running I can’t find any html docs.
ri Array gives me this:
= Array < Object
(from /mc/docs/computer/programming/ruby/rdoc)

= Instance methods:
abbrev, dclone, pretty_print, pretty_print_cycle, shelljoin, to_csv,
to_yaml, yaml_initialize
which is basically useless.
I know there is lots of docs online and have been DLing and using them but surely there is equivalent docs already on my drive if only I knew hao to access it, or am I just spoiled by what’s available with Perl?
Thanks for pointers,
Mike
I have no idea why the first portion of this post is in bold, apologies.
MM

2

I haven’t tried any of what you show here. I primarily use the doc at this site: https://ruby-doc.org, which is pretty much considered the canonical doc. Other resources I have used a good deal are The Ruby Programming Language by Ruby’s creator “Matz,” and Ruby Under a Microscope, which goes into considerable detail about what’s going on under the hood in Ruby.

3

Hi Bob,
I think you’ve made my point for me. I guess I’m spoiled by so much ‘C’ and Perl documentation available on the system and unused to having to go online to download it.
Ruby comes with ‘ri’ and ‘rdoc’ but I’ve yet found how to make them provide any usable documentatuon.
This little text box is still editing what I type, grr.
Mike

4

I kind of came into Ruby already used to it, because Microsoft went to online documentation a long time ago. I started with VB6 (well, VB4, really), which had all the doc on a CD that came with the package. But by the time .Net was well established, everything was online.

I still have to say that while I prefer Ruby to any of the .Net languages, Microsoft’s .Net doc is considerably more thorough than Ruby’s. If you stick with those three sources (the online doc as the primary one), then you should have no (well, not a lot of at least) trouble finding answers.