[Newbies] Stephane Ducasse's 'Learning to Programing with Robots'

[Max Norman]

I'm a novice programmer, who, at the suggestion of several more 
experienced developers, is attempting to get familiar with Smalltalk 
before moving on to Ruby, to more thoroughly learn and understand the 
concepts of object-oriented programming. First off, is this worth doing?

Second, does anyone have any experience with Stephane Ducasse's 
'Learning to Programing with Robots'? The book appears to be aimed at 
absolute beginners, like myself, who need to cover the conceptual 
aspects of programming before moving on to different languages. Is it 
worth buying and studying?

'Squeak by Example' appears to be for more experienced programmers, who 
are approaching Squeak/Smalltalk from a linguistic perspective.