As much as I love using Ruby on Rails, I still find it a bit rough around the edges. For one thing, the documentation leaves much to be desired. As I’ve said before, Agile Web Development with Rails is a great computer book, but Rails is far too large to be fully documented in one book. There’s also the API documentation, which is OK but not great.

The thing I find most exasperating, though, is the documentation for Rake, a Make replacement for Ruby. (If you’re a Java developer, think Ant.) It’s not the fault of the guy who provides the documentation, he’s a volunteer who I am sure is doing what he can. It’s just a sign that this Rails stuff is still pretty much on the cutting edge. (I seem to remember the Ant documentation being in a terrible state for quite some time as well.) What it comes down to is more hacking and less Googling, which is probably good for the brain anyway.