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

[David Mitchell]

By the way, Steph has fought to get the license released for the
Robots book. So I think it is now available under a creative commons
license. Still worth buying, but that is great news for the community
going forward.

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 11:18 AM, David
Mitchell<david.mitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Max Norman<maxnorman at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 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?
>
> I think so. Several of the most active presenters at our local Ruby
> user's group were Smalltalkers first.
>
>>
>> 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?
>
> Steph actually fought for the creation of the beginners list (and is
> probably reading now).
>
> Great book. I've used this book as courseware for people with no
> programming experience. My two sons (12 and 11) are working through it
> right now. One of the things I've noticed is without this book, I tend
> to gloss over programming concepts that are explained carefully (like
> looping, iteration, when to write a routine, etc.)
>
> After that book, I'd recommend
>
> - Kent Beck's Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (not Squeak specific)
> but very handy for learning idioms. Try reading a pattern a day. Many
> of them won't make any sense, but eventually they will start to click.
> - Chamond Liu's Smalltalk, Objects, and Design (written for VA) but
> great for learning Smalltalk
>
> Certainly keep Squeak by Example handy (at least in electronic form)
> as you learn.
>
>> 'Squeak by Example' appears to be for more experienced programmers, who are
>> approaching Squeak/Smalltalk from a linguistic perspective.
>