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<P>Greetings All,</P>
<P>I'm a newbie squeaker, and I've been digging into squeak for two weeks now. I have to say, comming for other environments (Java, Perl, Python, etc..), I really love how this language has twisted my thinking around and given me new insight into programming in general. The little bit of tinkering and research that I've done has really expanded my thinking, and things that other languages (Java and Python) have inherited from Smalltalk just make sense now =).</P>
<P>However, I have to argue the commonly held belief that Smalltalk is easy to learn. While it's true that I learned the general syntax in a day or two easily, being able to produce useful code still escapes me. I feel that learning Smalltalk is actually pretty difficult since you must also learn the class lib to be able to do anything in the language. I don't feel that you can seperate the syntax from the class lib while learning the language. Throw the enviornment on top of all that and it becomes pretty confusing to newbies. The barrier to entry is pretty high at this point. Additionally, the state of the documentation for Squeak just compounds this issue (there's a number of negative postings on comp.lang.smalltalk about Squeak being too difficult to learn because of the documentation).</P>
<P>Now, having said all that, I'm not here to just complain that Squeak is difficult to learn. After reading just about everything that I can get my hands on (Still have the Art and Science of Smalltalk comming in the mail though - fantastic book, but the online version has ocr errors) I've noticed that the Squeak community values action. So, I've decided to turn my confusion into a project, and as I learn I'll document my discoveries for others (I've started to enjoy writing as I get older =). To that end I've registered the domain squeak-mentors.org, and I'll be pulling together links to all the documentation I can find to start with. And, Then I'll start adding my own tutorials and documentation.</P>
<P>I'm sure that you've probably heard similar statements before, and I'll have to produce some results before much of this is taken seriously, but I wanted to send this out to everyone to get thoughts, ideas and advice on this. Also, I wanted to see if anyone else in the community wanted to join in. With all the press that Squeak is getting now it seems like a perfect time to consolidate links to the current documentation (which is spread out all over the internet), and get some additional newbie docs out there to help interested people get started without all the furstration and confustion. </P>
<P>Anyways it's good to be here, and I look forward to helping out.</P>
<P>Sincerely,</P>
<P>Jason Burke</P>
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