What do you think?
Rate this book
Art and Science of Smalltalk, The
Split into two parts, the first part (the Science of SmallTalk) covers the important technical background for programmers and managers; while the second part (the Art of SmallTalk) introduces some of the basic philosophy of SmallTalk. It includes a step-by-step guide taking readers through the basics--right up to designing, coding, and debugging their own programs.
250 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1995
15 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 2, 2012
This book succumbs to the classic Smalltalk book disease: it teaches the basics in some specific dialect, teaches you some basic OO design patterns and then unleashes you to go find the details on your own in the image.
It's fun to single a book out for this treatment, but the truth is that almost every Smalltalk book follows this depressing pattern. Seek out "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns" and cross your fingers for the Pharo project creating this missing documentation.
It's fun to single a book out for this treatment, but the truth is that almost every Smalltalk book follows this depressing pattern. Seek out "Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns" and cross your fingers for the Pharo project creating this missing documentation.
December 26, 2018
I'm a Smalltalk noob, and this is the first book I completed after dabbling around the syntax (and starting the Pharo MOOC). It's been a week since I started with the language and I would say this is a good beginners book.
The book is divided into 2 parts:
The Science
This introduces the syntax of the language, and gives a quick tour of the IDE and the standard library. Describing some of the common protocols helped me understand how the language is structured in the stdlib. The chapters on Dependency Mechanism & MVC were really nice.
Of course, the language is huge with thousands of methods and it would be impossible to cover it all in 250 page book. The author knows about it and shows the way how to actually dig deep into the code and check how the things are implemented. More like teaching the reader how to fish instead of giving him/her a fish to eat.
The Art
This section I skimmed quickly because it contained a lot of tricks of writing reusable, clean code. Most of these were not specific to Smalltalk & anyone who's read a few books on writing good code will not get much out of this section. But again, this book is pretty old & predates the books by Uncle Bob so I guess this section was pretty useful when it was published back in the day.
If you've got a day or two to quickly go through the book, I would recommend it.
The book is divided into 2 parts:
The Science
This introduces the syntax of the language, and gives a quick tour of the IDE and the standard library. Describing some of the common protocols helped me understand how the language is structured in the stdlib. The chapters on Dependency Mechanism & MVC were really nice.
Of course, the language is huge with thousands of methods and it would be impossible to cover it all in 250 page book. The author knows about it and shows the way how to actually dig deep into the code and check how the things are implemented. More like teaching the reader how to fish instead of giving him/her a fish to eat.
The Art
This section I skimmed quickly because it contained a lot of tricks of writing reusable, clean code. Most of these were not specific to Smalltalk & anyone who's read a few books on writing good code will not get much out of this section. But again, this book is pretty old & predates the books by Uncle Bob so I guess this section was pretty useful when it was published back in the day.
If you've got a day or two to quickly go through the book, I would recommend it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews