Intro To Programming
Mark Guzdial
guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Wed Jun 23 12:55:22 UTC 1999
>Peter Coad's Object Oriented Programming -- Probably the best Smalltalk book
>that doesn't have Smalltalk in the title. I still see this book at Borders
>and it is one of my favorites. I think it does the best job of showing what
>building corporate systems is like in Smalltalk. Definitely not sexy, but
>one of the only books of its kind. Also, I think the students at Georgia
>Tech use this book in their Squeak classes, so you can fileIn rather than
>type and not worry about compatibility issues. (This book also gives equal
>time to C++, but you can skip those sections entirely if you like)
We used to use Peter Coad and Jill Nicola's book -- for one quarter, even
after we switched from VisualWorks to Squeak. Some of the issues for
switching:
- It's heavily VisualWorks oriented. Much of the first three chapters deal
with HCI issues, which are not relevant for Squeak. We created a
compatibility set of classes so that the HCI classes cited in the book
could be used in Squeak, but it was a hack.
- Students never really liked the book much. It's really informal, which
makes for a great intro/tutorial. But undergrads tend to use their books
as references, and get their intro/tutorial from lecture. Coad and Nicola
is oriented around four cases, with a missing index.
- What makes the book most interesting is that every example is done in
both Smalltalk and C++. For a class such as ours which introduced both
Smalltalk and C++, it was perfect. But as we lessened the C++ coverage in
favor of more Smalltalk, the combination became more confusing for students.
For the last year, we used the Purple book along with a partial draft of my
book, and that seemed to work pretty well. I hope to use the full draft of
my book this coming academic year.
Mark
--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
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