O'Reilly Squeak book?

Mark Guzdial guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
Tue Apr 16 20:52:10 UTC 2002


On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 02:55  PM, Cees de Groot wrote:

> Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> said:
>> Well, I think a rounded off cut a la "Stable Squeak" should be the
>> target, but with a nice list of minimal criteria for coverage of
>> multimedia, UI, etc. I'm sure that Ruby and REBOL continue to
>> progress, but just not as much out in the open as on the Squeak list.
>> This is where a "Stable Squeak" or "Squeak Foundation" would really
>> help, namely to put out a real release that satisfies "a list" and
>> that then can have a useful subset documented.
>>
> Even without SqueakF, a companion site could hold The Official Version
> With The Book for all platforms. Between writing and publication, you'd
> have a couple of months of testing, polishing, and making sure that a
> really good version is made available there.

I tried that strategy with the White book.  It contains a CD with Squeak 
2.7 and 2.8, and all examples are guaranteed to work there.  But most 
hobbyists will go directly to Squeak.Org and download the Latest, which 
can't be guaranteed to work with anything written on dead trees.

>
> Furthermore, I think that a teaching (oops: learning) and reference
> book on Squeak would have lots of stable places: Smalltalk seems to be
> reasonably stable; if you've been taught the basics of EToys you wont'
> really be surprised at what turns up in a later image. Also, it would
> be relatively easy to plan writing according to a volatility scale, so
> the stuff that's most likely to change is done latest (starting with,
> say,  chapters on "history", "objects", "smalltalk the language" 
> etcetera)
>
The issue isn't that the base of Smalltalk is relatively stable.  The 
issue is that motivating examples tend to get built with the higher 
level code, which DOES still change.

Mark




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