Good, thorough Smalltalk reference

Marcus Denker denker at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Jan 16 09:00:48 UTC 2006


On 16.01.2006, at 09:21, Cees De Groot wrote:

> 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.

I disagree. Of course, once you know how to use Squeak, you don't need
a book. But a book woukd be crucial if the goal is to make it easy for
new people to learn it.

First problem: People who want to discover Squeak won't *believe*
that a book is not needed. Don't even try. If the goal is to make  
Squeak easy
to learn, write a book. Kind of like an API to implement. Leran ==  
Book. No book,
no learn.

Another thing is that a book should tell you the stuff that is not  
trivially apparent,
like how to use Squeak to find more infos so you don't need that  
book ;-)

It should talk about Design, Patterns, good style, good ideas (e.g.  
testing), stuff
like that. You can't tell me that this is "apparent" from just  
looking at Squeak
(especially as Squeak is mostly an example of what *not* to do!)

And trees: That's what it is, even today. I print every paper I have  
to read,
I don't know many people who read pdfs on screen.

I don't think that a language can be successfull without having
"the book" published. E.g. Ruby's success ouside japan is
  unthinkable without the book.

    Marcus



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