To be fair, the reason Ruby had such lousy English documentation is that it originated in Japan.
There's no excuse for the state of the core Rails documentation, however.
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It's kind of a lose-lose situation for any open source software, isn't it? If the core documentation is great people will complain that the books are a waste of money, since you can get everything from the documentation. If the core documentation is poor, people will complain that they're pumping the book market.
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Very true. For all of the flaws of POD and the organization of the Perl core documentation sometimes, I think it's really spoiled us. It can be very difficult to compete with that documentation in a book.
On the other hand, someone put a lot of work into the API browser for Rails, and for the Rails projects I did, I found it almost unusable. (Then again, I found the first Rails book almost useless too. I'm picky.)
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