Best Smalltalk/Squeak Books

Question

What is a single book you would recommend to someone interested in Smalltalk?

I've started looking into Smalltalk some weeks ago. So far I've gone through the Cincom tutorials (1 and 2) and I've read Squeak by Example, which I found quite good for getting the hang of the Smalltalk model, despite the poor organisation and several mistakes. Now I've started The Art and Science of Smalltalk.

What book would you recommend? I'm looking for something short, but concise, something that really captures the interesting and powerful bits of Smalltalk, like K&R is for C.

Answer 1

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns by Kent Beck

Answer 2

I recommend Smalltalk by Example by Alec Sharp. It's out of print but still available 2nd hand. Lot's of examples and an easy read.

Answer 3

Gosh, this is certainly Smalltalk night on StackOverflow!

Frankly, my opinion is that there are no books on Smalltalk of the quality of those available for C and C++. Squeak By Example, which you have already read, is one of the better ones, but that's not saying much. The only good news is that almost all ST books are available on line, so you won't be out of pocket if you pick up a clunker - see http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html for a list.

Answer 4

"something that really captures the interesting and powerful bits of Smalltalk"

Most of the books try to get a complete beginner up-to-speed with the basics of a particular Smalltalk implementation and IDE - the "interesting and powerful bits" tended to be discussed in technical reports, papers in conferences like OOPSLA and ESUG, and magazine articles.

You'll be able to find pdfs for some of those, for example "Wrappers to the Rescue" pdf

I suggest you look at code, like the MOOSE subprojects.

Answer 5

The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion is not really about Smalltalk per se, but it gives the perspective of Smalltalk on the well-known GoF patterns. IMHO it explains and discusses each pattern better than the GoF book.

We wrote Squeak by Example to help people get up to speed with the tools and environment in Squeak, rather than with Smalltalk itself. Things can be, how to say, colorfully confusing in Squeak :) It gets better with Pharo though.

I discovered Smalltalk with Alec Sharp's Smalltalk by Example, because it's more a mentoring book “look, here's how I do that usually”. Actually, the language itself is quite easy to understand, the problem is more with the tools, the environment, the libraries, the workflow. And for that the best is just practice, exploration, and asking stupid questions on the squeak-beginners mailing list, for instance :)

Answer 6

There is a follow-up of "Squeak by Example" in the making. Stay tuned!

Answer 7

I found Smalltalk: Getting The Message The Essentials of Message-Oriented Programming with Smalltalk by Alan L. Lovejoy to be one of the best introductions to Smalltalk: http://www.smalltalk-resources.com/Smalltalk-Getting-the-Message.html

Answer 8

The Definitive book of Smalltalk is "The Blue Book". It's definitive the same way that K&R was definitive for C (at least until there was an ANSI spec).

Here's the reference:

http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-Language-Implementation-Adele-Goldberg/dp/0201113716

It's out of print these days (because the last part of the book on how to build your own smalltalk is now out of date).

You have to get "The Purple Book" - which is the Blue Book minus the out of date bits:

http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-Language-Adele-Goldberg/dp/0201136880

You can still download a whacking big 32Mb PDF of the entire blue book here:

http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook.pdf