Head First Ruby

Chapter 11. Documentation: Read the Manual

There isn’t enough room in this book to teach you all of Ruby. There’s an old saying: “Give someone a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach them how to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.” We’ve been giving you fish so far. We’ve shown you how to use a few of Ruby’s classes and modules. But there are dozens more, some of them applicable to your problems, that we don’t have room to cover. So it’s time to teach you how to fish. There’s excellent documentation freely available on all of Ruby’s classes, modules, and methods. You just have to know where to find it, and how to interpret it. That’s what this chapter will show you.

Learning how to learn more

Your team is really enjoying the transition to Ruby. They’re impressed with the Array and Hash classes, and all the capabilities of the Comparable and Enumerable modules. But one developer has a concern...

An array is used to hold a collection of objects. The collection can be any size you need.

Good question... Now is probably a good time to talk about Ruby’s documentation.

Ruby’s core classes and modules

As we’ve said before, Ruby comes with a huge collection of classes and modules to handle a ...