mwgrant2001 <mwgrant2001 at yahoo.com> wrote:
[Sample projects with step-by-step descriptions and rationales]
> What am saying, however, is that I believe that such mini-
> project--projects that do something--would be great aids to Squeak 
> novices, particularly with experience in other programming languages. 
Yes, that makes sense. I think it would be valuable if you evaluate some
of the existing materials, and let us know which might serve the goals
you need. Have you looked at 
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/67? 
Then we can make sure that this material is easily enough accessible by
rearranging the Swiki.


> Where should these projects be in the Swiki? I don't think they 
> should be in the Swiki. They should be nailed in place a click away 
> from the Squeak homepage.
Nah, we like Swikis. They're late bound and we like that. Smalltalkers
are into exploration and education, not planning and enforcement.

> The R project that I mentioned before has a 
> very good approach to documentation. In particular there is 
> a 'contributed' documentation pages and a newsletter. They have 
> proven to be invaluable for mingling the expertise of the developers 
> with the users, and they have attracted contributors not on the core-
> team. Check it out. Here is the link:
>   http://www.r-project.org/
Yes, I've now done a quick review of their site. I agree that they have
a very rich, probably effective approach to documentation. The
newsletter element, for example, is completely missing from the Squeak
community, thought a variant of it existing with Squeak-News, which is
currently dormant. I think equivalents of almost everything else there
do exist, but their sites organization is probably better at reflecting
this. I also like the way they inline a page from the mailing list
archive into the site, and also their CRAN contributed pacakges listing
(our equivalent is SM - but that is a bit farther away, navigationally).


> As for my help. OK, I'll do what I can. In my way, or do you have 
> some specific needs? 

You never did get around to specifying which parts of the R site are the
most useful. I think a very effective way of contributing to Squeaks doc
situation would be to identify the most important elements, their
equivalents in Squeak, and then eliminate the problems that make those
elements hard to find by careful refactorings to the Swiki.

[problems creating code]
So, IIUC, the problem is mostly deciding the subclass structure? Common
practice is to subclass either Object, or another class that is intended
for extension by subclassing, like Morph (a negative example - almost
never subclass collections, they're intended to be used, not
subclassed).

As to sample code, you have an image full of code you can look at, plus
>300 packages on SM. Not all are good examples, and there is not one
specific "correct" style, but you shouldn't worry about it too much at
the beginning - first make it work, then make it right.


> > Which of the free books (or others) do you consider the best one for
> > learning the language/libraries/environment as present in 
> Smalltalk? 
> 
> Let me think about this, and maybe answer later. A broader discussion 
> on books may help others on the forum? 
Sure. I note that Stef's books site is not directly linked from
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/63. If we had links to select one
right there, that might solve part of the problem.

Daniel