When comparing MacRuby: The Definitive Guide vs NEXT Academy, the Slant community recommends NEXT Academy for most people. In the question“What are the best resources to learn Ruby?” NEXT Academy is ranked 12th while MacRuby: The Definitive Guide is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose NEXT Academy is:
You can enroll in the Blended Learning Platform where you can meet with your mentor face to face. This is best for students who learn more with one-on-one mentoring.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Has an in-person training mode
You can enroll in the Blended Learning Platform where you can meet with your mentor face to face. This is best for students who learn more with one-on-one mentoring.
Pro Offers certificates of achievement after each course
Pro Practice the code after each video
After each video, you will be given the chance to build projects and do exercises to test what you have learned.
Pro Human review and feedback
Students will get actual feedback from mentors on coding projects/exercises.
Pro Bite-sized lessons
Next Academy doesn't overwhelm beginners with information. The lessons are bite-sized, and video lectures/tutorials are between 2-5mins long.
Cons
Con Outdated - Material is no longer very relevant.
MacRuby is not the best introduction to the Ruby language, as it was meant as an introduction to MacRuby which is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 on top of the native Objective-C runtime and CoreFoundation framework of OSX - and is not just the RUby language itself.
Furthermore, wiith the recent dump of Objective-C by Apple, most of the libraries that MacRuby was built on top of no longer exist in OSX distributions, so the project is effectively outdated. Refer to the referenced Readme on their Github project for more information.
Con Requires your commitment and time
Next Academy's courses are not self-paced and follow a set of schedule.
Con Paid
Most full-tme courses are around US $2000.