> I took the following code out the of new Ruby Book

From the page 490, I assume.

> resp, data = h.get2('/index.html') 
...
> print data[0..55]
...
> oddly, the variable "data" is nil. 

Well, the thing is that at least my book has it like

> resp, data = h.get('/index.html') 
                    ^----- note missing '2'

There's a difference between these two forms, as plain get returns the body
of the document (response) as a second item. get2 OTOH returns only the
response, and then you can access the body by resp.body().

	- Aleksi