John Hinsley wrote:
> Well, the Open University's M206 tries to do this (you can probably
> find someone who has the material in Brazil) but the OU seems to see
> M206 as a fast path to Java, so I'm not so sure you'd approve of it! 

If it gets the job done then I certainly won't quarrel about motives. I 
have tested LearningWorks, but only very superficially.

Roger Kenyon suggested:
> John McGuinn's online tutorial: http://members.aol.com/M206ou/m206/

This is great material - thanks for the reference! But while it does a 
fantastic job of getting all the little details through in a reasonable 
order, I am not sure too many non programmers would enjoy it. As I 
thought about why I had this feeling, I saw that part of the fault is 
with the LearningWorks GUI itself. It is a serious improvement for the 
beginner compared to typing stuff in a workspace windows and doing 
"print it", but is way too abstract compared to Self. There the number 
3 is an actual object that you drag around (with the morphic shadow). 
You send it messages more directly and the results are clearly new 
objects. I am sure we can do even better and it is likely that 
MorphicWrappers in Squeak might be a step in the right direction (I 
haven't tested it).

Then, of course, there is the tile script route...

> Patrick Winston's slim book "On to Smalltalk". I really like the way
> this guy writes and wish he would do a book on Squeak or Javascript.

A review in the above site says "This text provides a concise 
introduction to the Smalltalk language, suitable for those who need a 
quick start with Smalltalk but who already know how to program."

And I agree. I had very high hopes when I first ordered this book since 
it was Winston's "red book" ("Artificial Intelligence", split into "AI" 
and "Lisp" books in later editions) that got me into computing. I found 
it a bit more formal than I had expected, just like McGuinn's tutorial.
But I already knew Smalltalk very well when I read it and that might 
have given me a wrong impression of it.

John Hinsley also wrote:
> I wonder how close Mark Guzdial's book comes to meeting the bill? I
> know it's not designed with that in mind, but if you told people to
> ignore the references to other languages, or maybe gave them 3
> intensive days teaching with Bash (Bash because it's useful and
> doesn't introduce C habits as ksh or Csh would) first?

I haven't read it, but I am sure there are people for whom it would 
work. People have different tastes so it is impossible to generalize. I 
really enjoyed the original Kerninghan&Ritchie for C, for example, but 
many people hate it (they want more details and a slower pace).

-- Jecel