On 1/16/06, joshscholar at nightstudies.net <joshscholar at nightstudies.net> wrote:
> Documentation, and it's lack is one of my pet peeves from my working life,
> so forgive me my passion on this subject.  But perhaps I can say something
> useful.
>
Yup, but please don't cut trees for it. Documentation in bookform
(even electronic, like PDF) is all but unusable in Smalltalk.

What *is* needed, is better class documentation. And maybe a nice full
text search system. The system must document itself, because as Tim
remarked, there is no such thing as a single Smalltalk system.

Apart from that, when learning Smalltalk I didn't go for the big, fat
reference books. My Smalltalk bookshelf consists mainly of a couple of
thin volumes:
- The Art and Science of Smalltalk (Simon Lewis);
- Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns (Kent Beck);
- Smalltalk, Objects and Design (Chamond Liu).
None of these are specifically about Squeak, but if you grok Smalltalk
then finding your way around in any specific implementation shouldn't
be too hard. All of them try very hard, each in its own way, to bring
across what Smalltalk is about and how to develop in it.