Which is a penalty I suppose I’ve learned to accept when I’m travelling. But at my home workstation, I should be able to see the docs any time I want, right?<\/p>\n
PHP is a kludged-together, ugly mess of a language. But its documentation is quite superlative: practically every function has documentation written in a more-or-less standardized format, plus whatever comments users have added. In addition, they have something near and dear to my heart:<\/p>\n
Downloadable documentation.<\/p>\n
This means that if I’m developing on an airplane at 30,000 feet, or on a BART train in the tunnel that runs underneath San Francisco Bay, I can just use my own local copy of the docs.<\/p>\n
I’ve long been annoyed with the state of both Ruby’s documentation and Ruby On Rails’ docs. Both of them use the awkward, quadruple-framed RDoc format that breaks up screen real estate inefficiently, makes keystroke navigation difficult if not impossible, and forces the browser to load a 600K page listing every single Rails method, even if what I really want is just the Class hierarchy listing.<\/p>\n
But the other thing that’s annoyed me about Ruby’s and Rails’ docs for a while is that there is no downloadable version available. If I haven’t got an Internet connection available, I can’t<\/em> look up the docs. End of story.<\/p>\n Which is a penalty I suppose I’ve learned to accept when I’m travelling. But at my home workstation, I should be able to see the docs any time I want, right?<\/p>\n
![\"api.rubyonrails.org](\"\/images\/api.rubyonrails.org.fail.png\" "\\"click")
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