Rails-doc.org is my new Rails Reference
When working with a framework as large as Ruby on Rails its necessary to have a reference close by for… well just about everything. Until recently I was a big fan of gotAPI.com because I really appreciated the Ruby and Rails reference tied together. However, the Javascript autocomplete on their search box is broken in Firefox 3 so I decided to try the new Rails reference site, Rails-doc.org.
Rails-doc.org is an fairly ambitious project to create a community driven Rails documentation site. Basically they let users sign up and contribute notes to the existing Rails documentation. This certainly has the potential to be very useful, especially for new Rails hackers because sometimes the people who have been around the framework for a while just take things for granted.
Take the documentation for strftime in the Date class for example. There is no documentation listed for that method. Despite the fact that you clearly need documentation of the strftime options in order to use that method. Instead you have to know to look under strftime in the Time class for the documentation. While this is an example specific to Ruby documentation, these are the kinds of obvious problems that a community documentation website can help solve.
Right now Rails-doc.org has only been live for a month the so amount of community documentation feels very low. In the mean time I’ll be using the site for the official documentation that is already in place. Plus its the best looking rendering of the Rails documentation site out there. The Nodeta guys did a good job with the design. They also have a nice looking blog.
It will be interested to see how many of the notes contributed to Rails-doc get ported to the official Rails documentation. This certainly feels like the easiest and most straightforward way to contribute to Rails documentation and I can see it becoming a testing ground for future contributions to the official docs.
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[...] – bookmarked by 2 members originally found by ThePerfectHitman on July 09, 2008 Rails-doc.org is my new Rails Reference http://thinkingdigitally.com/archive/rails-docorg-is-my-new-rails-reference/ – bookmarked by 2 [...]
After using Rails-doc.org (now called apidoc.com) for several months now I have to say that while I still like it, I rarely use it just because the site feels so unbearably slow.