When comparing MacRuby: The Definitive Guide vs Try Ruby, the Slant community recommends Try Ruby for most people. In the question“What are the best resources to learn Ruby?” Try Ruby is ranked 13th while MacRuby: The Definitive Guide is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Try Ruby is:
Try Ruby offers a hands on approach and allows seeing what code does instantly.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Interactive
Try Ruby offers a hands on approach and allows seeing what code does instantly.
Pro Free
Available online for free.
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Con Outdated - Material is no longer very relevant.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of the libraries that MacRuby was built on top of no longer exist in OSX distributions, so the project is effectively outdated.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 Not good for beginners
This assumes you've had some experience programming before, it doesn't go into to much detail with some of the basic introduction concepts.
