<br><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">Giovanni Corriga wrote:</font>
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<br><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">"squeak-mentors.org</font>
<br><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">Jason Burke is a Squeak newbie who has been </font><a href="http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-November/098188.html"><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">recently digging into Squeak</font></a><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">. He thinks that, even though Squeak's syntax is easy, becoming proficient with Squeak's class library can be a daunting task. For this reason, he has started </font><a href="http://squeak-mentors.org/"><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">Squeak Mentors</font></a><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">, a website which will collect many resources and tutorials on learning Smalltalk and Squeak. Wilkes Joiner has sent a reply, </font><a href="http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2005-November/098221.html"><font size=3 face="Times New Roman">pointing</font></a><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"> to a Squeak tutorial he has written."</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">*sputter*...*cough*...*spit*...</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">Ack! I wasn't ready. I plead temporary insanity due to full-time job and finals at school last week =).</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">To be honest and perhaps shine more light on the newbie's learning curve, I pretty much gave up on Squeak late last week and tried to go back to my beloved Python. I say "tried" because it didn't work. I keep going to back to Squeak even though I was totally frustrated. So, the truth is that you guys have completely ruined me now, and I'm no good for anything else =).</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">However, something happened yesterday that I can't explain. While reading John Maloney's Morphic tutorial, everything just suddenly made sense. There I am sitting at my desk, when that big "ah-ha" light bulb goes off, and all I can do is start laughing. Now, I'm not exactly sure exactly what I understand at this point, but I'm no longer pulling out my hair and swearing at the computer, so that has to be a step in the right direction. In fact, I was even poking through the String class last night and reading the class comments (*Gasp*). </font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">So, after all of this, I think I have a better feel for the Big Picture (TM), and while I no longer think it's a good idea to write yet-another-squeak-tutorial-that-goes-over-the-interface-basics, I do think it's a good idea to finish up my page with pointers to the good tutorials out there (which I should have done this weekend). I think I'm going to move onto useful class features and examples of their use next. At this point, the big stumbling block for me has been, funny enough, using blocks semi-effectively (heck, I'd even settle for slightly-effective at this point =). Any pointers to some help with this would be greatly appreciated (the root of my problem seems to be with understanding scope and getting data into and out of a block).</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">Also, in other news, I'll be pitching a proposal for a kids mentoring program (in which I plan to use Squeak) to my school's computer club this Friday night, and if that goes well, hopefully we'll start working with some kids early next year (this will be the third mentoring program I've worked on).</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">Anyways, there's my babble.</font>
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<br><font size=2 face="Arial">Jason</font>
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