Giovanni Corriga wrote:

"squeak-mentors.org
Jason Burke is a Squeak newbie who has been recently digging into Squeak. He thinks that, even though Squeak's syntax is easy, becoming proficient with Squeak's class library can be a 
daunting task. For this reason, he has started Squeak Mentors, a website which will collect many resources and tutorials on learning 
Smalltalk and Squeak. Wilkes Joiner has sent a reply, pointing to a Squeak tutorial he has written."

*sputter*...*cough*...*spit*...

Ack! I wasn't ready. I plead temporary insanity due to full-time job and 
finals at school last week =).

To be honest and perhaps shine more light on the newbie's learning curve, 
I pretty much gave up on Squeak late last week and tried to go back to my 
beloved Python. I say "tried" because it didn't work. I keep going to back 
to Squeak even though I was totally frustrated. So, the truth is that you 
guys have completely ruined me now, and I'm no good for anything else =).

However, something happened yesterday that I can't explain. While reading 
John Maloney's Morphic tutorial, everything just suddenly made sense. 
There I am sitting at my desk, when that big "ah-ha" light bulb goes off, 
and all I can do is start laughing. Now, I'm not exactly sure exactly what 
I understand at this point, but I'm no longer pulling out my hair and 
swearing at the computer, so that has to be a step in the right direction. 
In fact, I was even poking through the String class last night and reading 
the class comments (*Gasp*). 

So, after all of this, I think I have a better feel for the Big Picture 
(TM), and while I no longer think it's a good idea to write 
yet-another-squeak-tutorial-that-goes-over-the-interface-basics, I do 
think it's a good idea to finish up my page with pointers to the good 
tutorials out there (which I should have done this weekend). I think I'm 
going to move onto useful class features and examples of their use next. 
At this point, the big stumbling block for me has been, funny enough, 
using blocks semi-effectively (heck, I'd even settle for 
slightly-effective at this point =). Any pointers to some help with this 
would be greatly appreciated (the root of my problem seems to be with 
understanding scope and getting data into and out of a block).

Also, in other news, I'll be pitching a proposal for a kids mentoring 
program (in which I plan to use Squeak) to my school's computer club this 
Friday night, and if that goes well, hopefully we'll start working with 
some kids early next year (this will be the third mentoring program I've 
worked on).

Anyways, there's my babble.

Jason


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