[Newbies] Reading and writing C structs

[David T. Lewis]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:33:32PM -0700, David Finlayson wrote:
>
> I am a scientist not a proffesional programmer,
> but I've been coding all my life and coding is part of my job. That's
> why I am looking into Smalltalk. Can't get much higher level than
> this. Besides, I've always wanted to learn Smalltalk and/or Lisp.

Those sound like good enough reasons to me :)

In addition to the Simon Lewis book that you mentioned, I have found
"Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns" by Kent Beck to be something you
will want to read sooner rather than later. It's really worthwhile
and admirably brief (notwithstanding the title, there is none of the
nonsense that has been published as "patterns" elsewhere).

There is a good collection of free books to browse at
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html. "Smalltalk 80: The
Language" is still available in paperback, and is still worthwhile
today. "Squeak by Example" (http://squeakbyexample.org) is very good,
and covers contemporary Squeak.

Last but not least, be sure to read the "Back to the Future" paper
(http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/squeak/oopsla_squeak.html) for an
appreciation of Squeak as both a high level and down-to-the-metal
environment.

Dave