I wouldn't normally jump into a rails-core discussion, but what I'm working on seems relevant to this thread.
My colleague Christopher Haupt and I are deep into building a portal site to serve Ruby on Rails developers at www.BuildingWebApps.com. We're going to be providing annotated links to all the key content on the web related to Rails, and we'll have quite a few of our own articles as well. We'd be thrilled to work with the core team to make this as helpful for the community as it can be. We're also started the LearningRails podcast (www.LearningRails.com), which I think will be a great resource for people new to the platform, especially if they come from a traditional web background rather than a computer science background. One distinction that tends to get muddled in these discussions is that between documentation and tutorials. The Rails API documents are fine as far as they go, but they are API documentation, not tutorials, and they should not be expected to be the way new users learn the platform. (That said, they could use a little more explanatory text in many cases.) Tutorials are a different beast. (Obie Fernandez's new The Rails Way book, which is really outstanding by the way, is interesting because it sits more on the fence than other works: it is both documentation and tutorial.) We'll be creating a lot of tutorial content, but will be pointing to other places for documentation. Michael Slater www.BuildingWebApps.com P.S. In case you're wondering if this is another flash-in-the-pan site that will fade once the developers find more paying work, don't worry. This is a real business venture with (a little) funding and a (small) dedicated staff. How can we do this when all the content is free? We're offering seminars, which will be money-makers, and eventually we'll have some premium content (such as video tutorials). And the bigger picture here is that we're building a platform to organize the knowledge of any community. We're starting with the Rails community because it's the one we're part of and one for which we see big opportunities to make a contribution. But our long-term business plan is to make money by offering our platform for other knowledge domains. On Dec 14, 5:51 am, Thijs van der Vossen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Dec 14, 2007, at 14:50, August Lilleaas wrote: > > > The fact that an API is considered official documentation is a bit > > alarming, aint it? > > Why exactly? > > -- > Fingertips -http://www.fngtps.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
