Is ri worth showing new users? (Ruby)

Question

I've been working on a Ruby learning guide and I was told I should write about RI (Ruby Interactive Reference). After looking around the web I decided there wasn't that much information about the tool. Is that a problem?

RI seems like a terribly ineffective tool, and poorly designed! Manpages have always been a ghastly sight to read while coding and RI seems to work hard at being bad. The command 'ri --help' shows a block of text 90 lines long. It's writer having never heard of bread crumbing.

Perhaps though I am missing the usefulness of this tool.

Answer 1

My decision would decide on a personal basis, when you were a new user and learning Ruby did you find knowing RI to be useful or not?

That is, if you even learned RI first as a new user. I find that writing a guide for new users can be hard, but when you reach a road block, just think of when you were first starting off.

Hope this is useful,

Anthony

Answer 2

While coding I often find myself using ri to readf some part of the doc's I haven't fully memorized. And it so simple and fast to use it. All I have to do is open a terminal and type ri something. I don't have to open a bloated browser. I don't need to know the location of the doc's. I don't have to understand the layout and color's the developer choose for the doc's. I only have to type this two character r and i and I'll get all I want: A small text with informatikons about the class/method I am interested in.

I think the real usefullnes depend's on what your developments environment looks like. If someone works in an environment like me, where he codes with vim/emacs on the terminal and the terminal is mostly the faster/easier tool to use than any gui, he definitly want's to use ri. But if someone uses Eclipse, he might wan't to have some eclipse builtin ruby doc displayer(does this exist?).

So yes In my opinion it is realy worth showing. You wan't to show someone how to use ruby and not how to use his development environmet. So give him all the choises he need's to use ruby according to his own needs.

Answer 3

I would show them [ruby-doc.org][1] and gem server before getting into ri

[1]: http://www.ruby-doc.org and http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.8.7/index.html