Hello there...

While we're on the subject of learning Squeak, I
thought I'd share my own story.
I found Squeak in September. I'd been looking
for a good programming language for my daughter,
who is 4 and just learning to read. I believe I
found it with a search for "children" and
"programming". I installed Squeak and tried it
myself for a couple of hours.
It was obvious that it was not simply a
children's programming environment! The more I
used it, the more I liked it myself. I am not a
programmer really...I've used Perl to write some
simple scripts, but using Perl seemed almost
painful forme. Every time I wanted to do
something new it seemed to take too long to look
up and understand the syntax for it.
I think there is a "right" programming language
for each person. When you look at the language,
when you use it, it makes sense to you. It seems
beautiful. When you write code in it, it's
enjoyable for you. Smalltalk syntax clicked for
me in just this way.
The more I learned about Squeak, the more
enchanted I was with it. The story of its
creation is quite interesting. I began to see
the power of Morphic, easily ported my simple
Perl noodlings, and told my friends about the
wonders of Squeak. I installed Comanche and
wrote simple modules.
Well, at this point, I felt I'd exhausted the
online tutorials and decided to purchase a book.
I'd gotten the sense that Squeak regularly
underwent some pretty major overhauls so I
thought the most recent book would be the best
choice. I chose Squeak: Open Personal Computing
and Multimedia. I was hoping this would help
ease my transition from newbie to intermediate
programmer. I was kind of disappointed when I
realized that was not the focus of the book. I'd
already done the Morphic bouncing ball tutorial,
and the networking section didn't really help me
to understand how to do more complex things with
Comanche. I'm certainly not ready to hack the
VM!
So here I am. I love Squeak's syntax, the
programming environment, Morphic. I think there
are some wonderful, revolutionary ideas in it
and I'd love to be able to contribute. But I
feel stuck at this level. I really think the
lack of documentation and intermediate tutorials
is keeping me from doing much more with Squeak.
One project I'd like, for example, is to make a
version of the IRC client that is
all-in-one-window (all those windows eat up too
much screen real estate on my laptop!). But I
have no clue how to begin. Simply browing the
classes doesn't cut it for me at this point. I
need guidance!
What if I wanted to make a Morphic app with a
system window, input box, text pane, whatever? I
haven't found anything on how to do that.
VisualWorks has a tutorial for a simple random
number generator with a UI...something like this
would be immensely helpful to me. I'd also be
willing to pay for something like an online
class.
I'm not completely sure why I'm posting this
except to say that yes, I. R. Newbie is finding
the dearth of Squeak learning resources to be a
problem. I'd also like to thank you all for
spending so much time and effort making the
Squeak ideal a reality.
This is not meant to be insulting in any way. I
hope the day comes when I can do all of my
computing tasks in Squeak. I'd like to help make
that happen.
Suggestions, comments welcome.

Thanks for listening,
Jess