When comparing MacRuby: The Definitive Guide vs exercism.org, the Slant community recommends exercism.org for most people. In the question“What are the best resources to learn Ruby?” exercism.org is ranked 2nd while MacRuby: The Definitive Guide is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose exercism.org is:
Rather than merely test for code correctness, Exercism uses peer review to improve general programming techniques. Users are encouraged to comment on others' solutions, and refine their own based on feedback.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Human review and feedback
Rather than merely test for code correctness, Exercism uses peer review to improve general programming techniques. Users are encouraged to comment on others' solutions, and refine their own based on feedback.
Pro Practice with production tools
Unlike many code practice websites, Exercism requires the user to develop and test entirely offline, submitting only the finished code. This promotes familiarity with essential tools and workflow, not just the bare language.
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Con Outdated - Material is no longer very relevant.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of the libraries that MacRuby was built on top of no longer exist in OSX distributions, so the project is effectively outdated.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 Custom commandline client
Exercism requires using a CLI utility to fetch and submit exercises. This is inconvenient compared to web-only alternatives, and poses an additional barrier to entry for some users.