The curse of RTFM after the fact

Having jumped into rake to rebuild a build-script from msbuild, I’ve now found (er, read “bothered to read”) some “proper” rake documentation (it turns out I was too stupid to figure out the web interface to RubyDoc to stumble across the rakefile.rdoc documentation that explains rake’s capabilities) courtesy of Martin Fowler via Google while I was trying to figure out how to zip up my build output. Even though I’ve got a script that is (I reckon) pretty understandable, concise, and, well, working - it turns out I’ve reinvented the wheel a few times. That grates! Still. Live and learn - and re-rebuild at some point ;-)

To save other people the same mistake, here’re some useful things that I found:

• Ruby Core documentation - http://ruby-doc.org/core/
• Ruby StdLib documentation (which contains FileUtils for UNIX-like file commands) -http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/
• RubyZip documentation -http://rubyzip.sourceforge.net/ viahttp://rhnh.net/2006/05/26/packaging-with-rake
• Martin Fowler’s Using the Rake Build Language
• Rake documentation -http://rake.rubyforge.org/ - click on docs/rakefile.rdoc in the top-left frame (why does a language/stack with such a reputedly nice web-dev framework generate documentation that uses frames? How quaint!) for the actual “what can I do with rake” parts (I don’t really know why that’s not a tad more prominent)
• Jay Fields’ C# project file parser for Ruby(which will clearly be factored into my refactoring ;-) )