[Newbies] Totally dumbfounded!!
Stephen Ng
stephen.ng at planetnutek.com
Sat Jul 5 06:12:50 UTC 2008
David and everyone else,
Thanks for your input.
I won't get on my soapbox here and debate whether Smalltalk/Squeak is
suitable for anything. I'm just trying to find out about the language
and perhaps come to understand the OO paradigm. Some of you have
directed me to Squeak By Example (SBE) which I briefly looked at and
it really seems like a good beginners book.
It seems to me though that even though in smalltalk/squeak it is
possible to read all the code in the system, it is still a very poor
and inefficient way of learning about any of the class libraries in
Smalltalk. After looking up some of the code, I find I end up more
confused than when I started.
SBE has a few pages on Morphic but the class library for smalltalk
seems huge for a beginner like me. For example, after trying to look
at the Graphics classes, there may be many ways to instantiate an
object (I might be wrong, in that case I take back everything I have
to say on the subject!!). No one really has the time to go through
every method to find out which is suitable and even then the
commentary is not always very good. Some of the methods do not appear
to do anything useful (if I may say so) because they depend on the
support provided by a whole series of other methods (and even classes)
and states of variables. In the end I might still not have learnt how
the whole thing works! So my question is, is there any documentation
on the complete class library for Squeak written in a more accessible
style for the uninitiated?
Some of you might say that I should study Squeak more before
commenting. I guess I am trying to pre-empt things so that I don't go
down a path which eventually will lead me to too many dead ends.
Again thanks for all your comments and your interest in helping
someone out.
Stephen
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