On Tue, 13 Jul 1999 09:53:31 +0930, Peter Smet wrote:

>Agreed completely - I think diving in and making mistakes is the way to
>learn. I think reading someone else's code is the worst way to learn. For
>all those giving advice like: 'read what's in the image', how many of those
>actually learned Smalltalk that way? I tried this and found it next to
>useless. Until you get a firm grounding via tutorials and examples, reading
>the base classes makes no sense. 

I did.  I learned Smalltalk before there were any books except the 
Blue Book.  There were no tutorials.  I dove in and made mistakes, too.  
But the best way to learn how to do something is to look at how other 
people did it.  Examples ARE other people's code.  In general, reading 
uses of a class is a better way to learn how to use it than reading the 
class itself, but it is still useful to read the class itself.  

I agree that tutorials are valuable, but there is lots of stuff for
which there aren't tutorials, and you eventually need to learn how to
browse the system.

-Ralph