Section 17.1. Using RDoc

Chapter 17. Packaging and Distributing Code

With aspirin leading the way, more and more products are coming out in fiercely protective packaging designed to prevent consumers from consuming them.

Dave Barry

This chapter is all about being nice to your end user. If you don't have an end user, or don't want to be nice, you may skip this material.

Two things the typical programmer doesn't want to think about are user documentation and installation procedures. Here I'll try to present enough information to encourage you to do these things. Others have gone to great lengths writing Ruby tools and libraries to try to make these things easier.

This will, however, be a short chapter. You can learn more about these topics by looking at what others have done.

One of the greatest tools available is RDoc, originally created by Dave Thomas. We'll start there.