>Peter Coad's Object Oriented Programming -- Probably the best Smalltalk book
>that doesn't have Smalltalk in the title. I still see this book at Borders
>and it is one of my favorites. I think it does the best job of showing what
>building corporate systems is like in Smalltalk. Definitely not sexy, but
>one of the only books of its kind. Also, I think the students at Georgia
>Tech use this book in their Squeak classes, so you can fileIn rather than
>type and not worry about compatibility issues. (This book also gives equal
>time to C++, but you can skip those sections entirely if you like)

We used to use Peter Coad and Jill Nicola's book -- for one quarter, even
after we switched from VisualWorks to Squeak.  Some of the issues for
switching:

- It's heavily VisualWorks oriented.  Much of the first three chapters deal
with HCI issues, which are not relevant for Squeak.  We created a
compatibility set of classes so that the HCI classes cited in the book
could be used in Squeak, but it was a hack.

- Students never really liked the book much.  It's really informal, which
makes for a great intro/tutorial.  But undergrads tend to use their books
as references, and get their intro/tutorial from lecture.  Coad and Nicola
is oriented around four cases, with a missing index.

- What makes the book most interesting is that every example is done in
both Smalltalk and C++.  For a class such as ours which introduced both
Smalltalk and C++, it was perfect.  But as we lessened the C++ coverage in
favor of more Smalltalk, the combination became more confusing for students.

For the last year, we used the Purple book along with a partial draft of my
book, and that seemed to work pretty well.  I hope to use the full draft of
my book this coming academic year.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html