[Newbies] Is the "Blue Book" still useful?

[Casey Ransberger]

Answer is yes. A lot of things have changed since then, but the book documents a very valuable milestone in the evolution of the system. 

Particularly the Smalltalk description on the interpreter VM is worth investigation. 

Almost nobody in the Squeak community is using the Reenskaug MVC architecture, but industry is using it in other languages (or trying to) so that's worth a look, since it was the first implementation of the paradigm. These days, Trygve is doing something really cool called DCI, which is also worth a look.

Anyway as of now, the preferred document is usually the Blue Book, followed by the ANSI standard (which is not really a standard anyone cared much about.)

Neither will describe the current system, but they could both be useful for understanding how we got to the current system. 

Ultimately, the trick is to learn how to interact with and understand the system as it has evolved up to the moment when you start changing it. But to get there, you might have some (un)learning to do. 

HTH,

--C

> On May 22, 2015, at 8:07 PM, Daniel Roe <roedj at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have a copy of the Smalltalk-80 "Blue Book"by Goldberg and Robson. I am a complete noob when it comes to Smalltalk but would like to learn about it by using Squeak. Aside from some notational differences, that I can adjust to, is the "Blue Book" still useful in any way?
> Thanks for your time,
> 
> Dan
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