Here is a part of an announcment made last week, although you may want to
email Mark directly and ask him about the book he has written, but isn't
published yet.  He is using it for his class, Objects and Design.

Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 14:14:17 -0500
From: Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu>
Reply-To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
Subject: [ANN] SqueakBook Open for Review!
Resent-Date: 4 Feb 2000 19:18:26 -0000
Resent-From: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
Resent-cc: recipient list not shown: ;

The edited volume "Squeak: Applications and Community/Taking Another
Path" is starting to take shape.  With 4 of the 15 chapters now
submitted as first drafts, Kim Rose and I would like to invite the
Squeak community to help us with review of the chapters.  (It's an
open source reviewing of a book about an open source system.)

The chapters are being posted as PDF to:
http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/squeakbook/3  Everyone is welcome to
download and read the chapters, and comments from anyone are welcome.
Please keep in mind that these are FIRST DRAFTS --


--------------------
Jen a.k.a. Smilie
:-P
smilie at cc.gatech.edu


On Tue, 15 Feb 2000, Warren Postma wrote:

> " Introductory Blurb "
> 
> I'll confess my bias right out: I don't like Smalltalk's syntax. [yet.]
> 
> I'm a confirmed C/Delphi/Python bigot! :-)
> 
> My first attempt to learn Smalltalk was in my first year at university, in
> 1989. 
> I got a book on Smalltalk-80 by Adele Goldberg out of the school library. 
> It sure looked neat, but I couldn't find a machine to run it on. 
> 
> Then in 1995, I got VisualAge for OS/2. What a nice package. Having become
> disillusioned with the limitations of C++ classes and templates, I
> immediately grasped the superiority of a "Connectable Parts" metaphor.  My
> boss chose IBM Visual Age C++ instead, though.  Much to our surprise we
> found the templated C++ code it produced was bigger and more bloated, and 5x
> slower than VisualAge for Smalltalk.  And the program took several hours to
> do a full Make.  The company went out of business before their C++
> application was ever finished.
> 
> I had developed some respect for Smalltalk, even if I had no way to use it
> on my PC. 
> 
> So imagine my surprise to find a free Smalltalk. Wow.  
> 
> I'm a computer nostalgia buf. It was charming to boot up Sqeak and see
> something that looked so much like vintage Smalltalk-80. The look was
> reminiscent of the 
> first time I ever used X-Windows on a B/W X-Terminal, and I was also
> reminded of the pictures in the Adele Goldberg book.  I have to hand it to
> the designers, too. On a non-accelerated 640x480 display, with limited color
> depth, the Smalltalk-80 style GUI is a model of efficiency and useability.
> 
> Now I hate to tell any mother that her baby is ugly, but here goes:  On a
> Pentium-II 400 Mhz and 128 mb RAM with a 17" monitor with 1280 x 1024
> resolution and 32 bit color depth, Squeak's windows and widgets are a bit of
> a sore thumb. ;-)
> 
> However, anything that can be built on top of a few powerful patterns, which
> can be combined to build a whole product is very wonderful. Squeak gives the
> overall impression of being fractal; simple input, beautiful results.  
> 
> 
> 
> " Book Recommendations? "
> 
> Anyways, I'm looking for book recommendations, and so on.  I like 500+ page
> tomes.
> Maybe that's not the smalltalk philosophy, or maybe the fragmented nature of
> the various smalltalk vendors precludes a single book being that useful, but
> I'm wondering what y'all think about that.
> 
> If there is nothing Squeak-specific, then at least something that will help
> me get real stuff done in Squeak would be nice.  I like books that build a
> single large application or a useful bunch of related applets.  I would like
> to see some coverage of distributed object systems in Smalltalk as well.  I
> use DCOM heavily right now with Python, Delphi and Visual C++, and I'm
> starting to use XMLRPC/SOAP, and will also need CORBA and RMI in the future.
> 
> 
> Warren Postma
> wpostma at ztr.com
> 
>