[nex3]

That's the difference between reference documentation and introductory documentation. You go to reference documentation when you want to look up the details of something you already know; you go to introductory documentation if you want to learn it for the first time.

[wwortiz]

Okay sure, but how do you get from the introductory docs (which are far and wide, as well as lacking in quite a few areas) to reference documentation. I can see how ruby-doc can be a good resource but only for those that know the language and know what they should be looking for, even then though sometimes docs like python's are better references.

[dasil003]

Far and wide?

Just start with Rails Guides (http://guides.rubyonrails.org/). When you are somewhat familiar you can find details in the API docs (http://api.rubyonrails.org/).

[jshen]

there are also two great books, the agile rails book, and the rails way. They will get you started, and may be 90% of what you need. The docs are good for the rest.

One thing though, we're comparing apples and oranges; the docs for a web framework vs the docs for a standard library. Are the django docs similar to the standard lib docs?

I'm not trying to dis python, I really like python and use it whenever I need to do mathy stuff with numpy and scipy. Most other things I do in ruby.

[wwortiz]

The django docs are rather good and similar in many ways to python docs: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/