Hi folks;
After doing an Amazon search I just found a book called _On to Smalltalk_ by Patrick Henry Winston - I really like his style, _On to Java_ is one of my fave Java books by far.
So, how close is Smalltalk Express, the dialect he uses in the book, to Squeak?
Will I hopelessly scramble myself trying to learn using his book and Squeak instead of ST Express?
Thanks,
-Chris P. (Aspiring Squeaker) ____________________________________________________________________ |Chris Patti|ICQ#16333120|feoh@cosmic.com|Home #:(617)625-3194|JAPH| |"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - Alan Kay |
Squeak and StExpress are _very_ close syntactically. The differences will primarily be in method and class names, but they should be reasonably straightforward to translate. I'm not sure about his coverage of the WindowBuilder portion of StExpress, but that will be totally different from Squeak (of course, the original Smalltalk/V gui classes were totally different also).
You might find it useful to download the StExpress documentation from ObjectShare -- the old Digitalk tutorials were some of the best for getting started in Smalltalk and should be reasonably applicable to Squeak.
http://www.objectshare.com/se/seinfo.htm#sedownload
If you haven't taken a look at the Wolfgang Kreutzer's getting started tutorial on Squeak, I would recommend it:
http://kaka.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~wolfgang/cosc205/smalltalk1.html
-- Dwight
Asymptotically Approaching Harmony wrote:
Hi folks;
After doing an Amazon search I just found a book called _On to Smalltalk_ by Patrick Henry Winston - I really like his style, _On to Java_ is one of my fave Java books by far.
So, how close is Smalltalk Express, the dialect he uses in the book, to Squeak?
Will I hopelessly scramble myself trying to learn using his book and Squeak instead of ST Express?
Thanks,
-Chris P. (Aspiring Squeaker) ____________________________________________________________________ |Chris Patti|ICQ#16333120|feoh@cosmic.com|Home #:(617)625-3194|JAPH| |"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - Alan Kay |
Asymptotically Approaching Harmony wrote:
Hi folks;
After doing an Amazon search I just found a book called _On to Smalltalk_ by Patrick Henry Winston - I really like his style, _On to Java_ is one of my fave Java books by far.
So, how close is Smalltalk Express, the dialect he uses in the book, to Squeak?
Extremely close.
Will I hopelessly scramble myself trying to learn using his book and Squeak instead of ST Express?
Absolutely not with regard to the non-gui aspects. Once you get comfortable with the basics, then even the GUI differences won't really throw you off. I think that the Smalltalk Express tutorial is the best hands-on guide to learning Smalltalk available, but must admit my bias since I was a co-author of the Smalltalk Programming for Windows book that the tutorial is based on :-)
Thanks,
-Chris P. (Aspiring Squeaker) ____________________________________________________________________ |Chris Patti|ICQ#16333120|feoh@cosmic.com|Home #:(617)625-3194|JAPH| |"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" - Alan Kay |
Laurence Rozier wrote:
Asymptotically Approaching Harmony wrote:
Hi folks;
After doing an Amazon search I just found a book called _On to Smalltalk_ by Patrick Henry Winston - I really like his style, _On to Java_ is one of my fave Java books by far.
I ordered this book from Amazon.com and am also extremely impressed with it. I'm still very new to Smalltalk so hopefully some Squeak experts can expand on my comments below about problems with using the book to learn Squeak.
So, how close is Smalltalk Express, the dialect he uses in the book, to Squeak?
Extremely close.
In addition to GUI differences, file I/O is also handled quite differently from either Smalltalk (though it's a little closer to VisualWorks). While I was able to figure out the basics of file I/O in Squeak through trial and error, and looking at the Squeak source, I couldn't figure out an easy way to approximate the nextWord message supported by Smalltalk Express. I'll probably write my own nextWord so I can get past chapter 22.
The class browser is more similar to VisualWorks than to Smalltalk Express, so it may be helpful to jump to chapter 38 and read up on that difference. I haven't looked at the GUI stuff yet, but hopefully it's close enough to VisualWorks that I'll be able to figure it out without much trouble.
-Jake
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