Rich,

Others have offered far better than two cent's worth; all I've got is one
shiny penny.  As has been pointed out, Squeak and Smalltalk are dynamic
systems which change both with development and with use, so a generic book
is bound to be at least somewhat inaccurate.  My suggestion, therefore, is
to look into a book which defines or even includes the precise version of
Squeak (or other Smalltalk) upon which it is based.  This will, by the
nature of the beast, leave you with a more or less outdated version of the
language, but it shouldn't be outdated by much and can probably be updated
(as can you) fairly easily.

The most current of these, as far as I know, is Stef's "Squeak: Learn
Programming with Robots," ISBN 1590594916.  This book takes the reader by
the hand, assuming nothing, and leads on to a pretty fair overview of both
Squeak / Smalltalk and of programming in general.  A huge advantage of this
book is the author's active participation on this list.

Two more excellent choices are Mark Guzdial's "Squeak: Object-Oriented
Design with Multimedia Applications" (ISBN 0130280283) and his later
"Squeak: Open Personal Computing and Multimedia" (ISBN 0130280917).  Both of
these are based on older versions of Squeak (which they include) and deal
especially, as you might guess, with Squeak's particular strengths in
multimedia, but both are quite useful.  Finally, "Squeak: A Quick Trip to
ObjectLand" (ISBN 0201731142) by Gene Korienek et al, teaches Smalltalk in a
conversational manner which some love and some hate, using Squeak (included)
as its foundation.

None of these are "references" per se, which as others have pointed out is a
tough thing to do, but any of them can bring the user to the point where the
self-referencing features of Squeak / Smalltalk can be understood.

I hope that helps.

Gary


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rich" <rjseagraves at gmail.com>
To: <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2006 9:23 PM
Subject: Good, thorough Smalltalk reference


So that I don't have to keep posting queries to this list like the one
I just posted, I was wondering if anybody could recommend a good,
thorough Squeak/Smalltalk language reference.  So far searching online
I've found alot of "The 5 minute intro to Smalltalk" type stuff, but
as these intros becomes less helpful as I try to do more interesting
stuff (after all, you can only add 2 numbers or filter a list so many
times in the Workspace before the "coolness" wears off ;-).  Thanks
alot.

-Rich



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