I've been teaching myself Ruby using David Black's book, "The
Well-Grounded Rubyist". 5 chapters in or so, things are going well.
However, things would be going even better if I was able to get
started on the project that's motivating my course of study: there's a
C library I'd like to write Ruby bindings for.
The Black book, while appropriate in pace and tone for an experienced
programmer, doesn't cover any sort of Ruby C API. The pickaxe book
does, but before I go and buy a copy of that, I'd like to know if
those pickaxe chapters are really the canonical reference. That seems
weird.
What I'm looking for is the analogue to these pages:
Even if you don't learn from it, the PickAxe Edition 1 Online will give you an idea of the kind of coverage you can expect in the PickAxe later editions. When I get the chance later, I'll write back to let you know what is actually in the later edition. I think I did buy the book.
Cheers,
Mohit.
13/2/2010 | 11:57 PM.
···
On 13/2/2010 11:25 PM, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
> From what I can tell, the closest thing Ruby has to that is a raw
Doxygen dump...
If you download the Ruby source, there's a file called README.EXT
which gives a pretty good, detailed treatment of the Ruby C API.
Better than anything I've seen online. Here it is in the Ruby SVN: http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/branches/ruby_1_8/README.EXT
On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 10:25, Marvin Humphrey <marvin@rectangular.com> wrote:
Greets,
I've been teaching myself Ruby using David Black's book, "The
Well-Grounded Rubyist". 5 chapters in or so, things are going well.
However, things would be going even better if I was able to get
started on the project that's motivating my course of study: there's a
C library I'd like to write Ruby bindings for.
The Black book, while appropriate in pace and tone for an experienced
programmer, doesn't cover any sort of Ruby C API. The pickaxe book
does, but before I go and buy a copy of that, I'd like to know if
those pickaxe chapters are really the canonical reference. That seems
weird.
What I'm looking for is the analogue to these pages:
Basically you can use anything that enlists the API for ruby extensions, I had a hard time figuring all
out when embedding ruby into my window manager (subtle) and writing the C extension:
Many other things need to be checked in the ruby doxygen or even worse in the source code for stuff
like this:
Wbr,
Christoph
···
---- On Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:25:46 +0100 Marvin Humphrey <marvin@rectangular.com> wrote ----
Greets,
I've been teaching myself Ruby using David Black's book, "The
Well-Grounded Rubyist". 5 chapters in or so, things are going well.
However, things would be going even better if I was able to get
started on the project that's motivating my course of study: there's a
C library I'd like to write Ruby bindings for.
The Black book, while appropriate in pace and tone for an experienced
programmer, doesn't cover any sort of Ruby C API. The pickaxe book
does, but before I go and buy a copy of that, I'd like to know if
those pickaxe chapters are really the canonical reference. That seems
weird.
What I'm looking for is the analogue to these pages:
If you download the Ruby source, there's a file called README.EXT
which gives a pretty good, detailed treatment of the Ruby C API.
That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. On its own, it's
much more useful than the Doxygen dump -- but it also makes the
Doxygen dump itself more useful.
For what it's worth, I think that README should be given greater prominence,
as I was unable to discover such an important document despite some fairly
diligent web searching before asking for help here.
Better than anything I've seen online.
I agree.
Marvin Humphrey
···
On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 01:11:42AM +0900, Mat Brown wrote:
I think I'm going to need Rake, as the build process for this library is very
involved. The Perl bindings use Module::Build, the pure-Perl successor to
ExtUtils::MakeMaker, beause doing complicated stuff with MakeMaker is a
nightmare. I'm expecting to need something analogous for the Ruby bindings.
I also intend to publish a gem later. It seems like docs.rubygems.org is a
good place to start, though it references a non-existent "DeveloperGuide"
(sigh).
