>From one newbie to another:  hello!

Well, I can offer you my piece of experience with Squeak and Smalltalk...I've 
been using the 'purple book' (Smalltalk 80: The Language by Goldberg & Robson) 
as a general guideline to get me up to speed on the basics of the language.  
However in general I spend a lot of time just examining the system classes 
with the browser...that's about the best way to learn the 'intrinsics' of the 
system, since so many Smalltalks out there seem to do some of the same things 
differently. :)

I've been trying to learn Morphic of late and I've had some success...the way 
I've been doing it is by the tried & true method of examining other people's 
programs.  Specifically I've been looking at the source for Scamper and 
eekMail and I've figured out quite a bit from that...Scamper & eekMail seem to 
have been a good starting place for me, anyway.  So far Morphic has been 
wonderfully simple; coming from  a world of GUI programming in (ugh!) C and 
C++, it is a very refreshing change.

You can find pointers to the Scamper source on one of the main Squeak Wiki
servers (try searching at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.1).  Once you 
fileIn the source, take a look at the class definition of Scamper (especially 
the openAsMorph method)...there's lots of food for thought there.  After a 
little browsing I was able to create my first silly little program that tries 
hard to be a simple text editor.. ;)

Hope this helps..


Andreas Dieberger <adieber at emory.edu> wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I'm risking here to embarrass myself... so here we go.
> 
> I'm trying to teach myself Smalltalk / Squeak from books and from whatever
> I can get my hands on on the Web. I use mainly Winston's "On to Smalltalk"
> and also have the Hopkins + Horan book and Smalltalk-80, the language.
> 
> I made pretty good progress so far (I think) but I don't seem to be able to
> crack the mystery of Views, Controlles, Windows etc. Every one of the three
> books I have is based on a different Smlltalk and seems to describe
> completely different classes, and I couldn't find those in Squeak.
> 
> >From what I see on the Web and and in Squeak itself, Morphic is practically
> still undocumented, so I thought I just try to fiddle with the
> 'oldfashioned' way first, but I don't seem to be able to figure that one
> out either. My code reading skills are far from the point where I can learn
> what I have to do just from poking around with the system browser...
> 
> So is there any help for me? Could anybody point me to a few (simple,
> please) code snippets that show me the basics? Or is there some info on the
> Web or in the system that gives me a quick intro into this matter?
> 
> Thanks a lot and sorry to send such a newbie question into a list that
> normally is concerned with much more advanced issues... (is there a
> smalltalk newbie list anywhere...? It seems also that Emory.edu doesn't
> carry any of the smalltalk newsgroups :(( )
> 
> Andreas