[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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