Smalltalk An Introduction to Application Development using VisualWorks

By Trevor Hopkins and Bernard Horan

This book is a complete, stand-alone introduction to application development using Smalltalk-80. It provides a comprehensive description of the VisualWorks 2.0 development environment, the language and major aspects of the class library, including coverage of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm.

The book is aimed at students attending university/college and software professionals in industry. It can be used by both the specialist and the general reader: the specialist will find a detailed guide to the development of applications using VisualWorks; for the general reader, the book provides an introduction to Smalltalk-80 and the VisualWorks development environment.

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Practical Smalltalk Using Smalltalk/V

By Dan Shafer and Dean A. Ritz

This is a book about what we believe may well be the Computer Programming Language of the 90s: Smalltalk. No, you're not about to be subjected to yet another sales pitch for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and the languages that support that approach to software design and construction. If you've purchased this book, you're already sold on OOP and probably at least to some degree on Smalltalk as well.

As we looked at the available book titles about Smalltalk programming when we started this project, we noticed that those books as well as documentation for Smalltalk products, provided very good introductory information. But the level of detail was such that these materials did not really help the reader to see easily how real-world applications could be constructed in Smalltalk. Yet we realized, too, that once you have a Smalltalk environment in your hands, the natural thing to want to do is to build something useful and interesting. Helping you understand how to build applications is the sole focus of this book.

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The Art and Science of Smalltalk

By Simon Lewis

This book has been written to help you to help yourself. You may be considering adopting Smalltalk for your next project. You may have just started to program in Smalltalk. You may have been doing it for a while. Whatever your level of experience you'll know that Smalltalk is different. It's different from C, different even from C++, different to almost anything you'll have used before. These differences help give Smalltalk the power and productivity for which it is famous, but it's only by knowing how to exploit the differences that you can harness this power for yourself.

Smalltalk is different from other languages not only in its syntax (the parts of the language and how they go together), but in its whole philosophy of programming. Few programming languages are as interactive as Smalltalk. Fewer still make nearly all their source-code visible to the programmer on-line. This combination of features makes Smalltalk very powerful, but it can also make it intimidating to learn. This book aims to de-mystify that process by providing a practical rather than an academic introduction.

The huge code library that comes with Smalltalk is also a key part of its power. But which classes do what, which should you reuse, and which should you subclass? The aim of this book is to teach you the things you need to know to be able to program effectively in Smalltalk. You'll also learn which parts of the system you can safely ignore. You'll learn how to design your own classes, and how to use the existing ones. You'll learn how and when to use inheritance. You'll learn how to make the best use of the development tools, and how to split the work among the members of a team. Most of all, you'll learn how to adopt the Smalltalk style—how to find out what you need to know, without going to the manual. The Art and Science of Smalltalk isnot just for programmers though. Managers or leaders of teams using Smalltalk should find a lot to interest them, especially in Part II.

This book is not an introduction to programming. It is assumed that you have at least some experience of another language. Experience in C, BASIC, Pascal, COBOL, or any similar language is fine. Familiarity with using (though not necessarily programming with), a graphical user-interface is also essential. Microsoft Windows, the Macintosh UI, or the X window system are good examples.

The Art and Science of Smalltalk is not a methodology. It's not intended to give you a defined process that you can feed your problem into at one end, and have Smalltalk code come out of at the other. Sometimes, competing views of how things should be done will be presented. You'll have to decide which philosophy to adopt in your particular circumstances, but you will be making an informed decision. In this way, the book is not prescriptive, but instead it's 'assistive'. It's also not a tutorial. You are however invited—in fact you're encouraged—to try things out using the system. Smalltalk style supports this, and you should experiment whenever something is not clear, or you want to confirm or enhance your understanding.

You should treat this book as complementary to the documentation that comes with Smalltalk. The manual tells you how to install and fireup Smalltalk, and gives detailed and up-to-date descriptions of all the tools and many of the key system classes. Although this book includes an introduction to object-oriented programming (OOP), Smalltalk, and the development environment, its main purpose is to tell you how to make use of the tools, and how to use and reuse the system classes to maximum effect. It tells you the things you would otherwise only learn through experience.

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Inside Smalltalk (Volume One)

By LaLonde, Wilf R. and Pugh, John R

Programmers will discover how to use SmallTalk 80 for prototyping and software development. The SmallTalk language is fully explained as well as the class library and programming environment.

This textbook provides an intro to the object-oriented programming language Smalltalk-80, with an emphasis on classes, subclassing, inheritance and message passing.

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Smalltalk With Style

By Edward Klimas, Suzanne Skublics and David A. Thomas

Bridging the gap between established software engineering principles and the real-world practice of programming, this book presents guidelines for programming in the Smalltalk language that will result in source code that is clear, easy to read, and easy to understand. Covers layout and structure, code formatting, reliability and portability, and tips.

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Smalltalk by Example: the Developer's Guide

By Alex Sharp

The book is split into five sections: Basics, the Basic System Classes, Skills and Techniques, User Interface, and Advanced.

Section One, Basics, talks about the basics of Smalltalk. It talks about objects and classes, about messages and methods, and about variables and language syntax. It covers creating instances of classes and controlling program flow with the various conditional and looping structures. It ends with a chapter on thinking in terms of objects.

Section Two, the Basic System Classes, goes over some of the fundamental classes that you will use. Because everything in Smalltalk is an object, and all objects are instances of a class, we will talk about classes in every section. However, Section Two is more information oriented and less technique oriented than some of the other sections.

Section Three, Skills and Techniques, also talks a lot about the system classes, but covers techniques in using the classes. It shows how you work with Processes, how you can implement error handling code, and how to debug in Smalltalk. The section covers a lot of skills and techniques that you will use when developing your application.

Section Four, User Interface, focuses on user interface issues. It gives a lot of attention to the Model-View-Controller paradigm, then talks about how you can modify user interfaces at run-time. Since the user interface mechanisms differs widely between the different flavors of Smalltalk, this is the section most specific to VisualWorks.

Section Five, Advanced, is an advanced section, not because the topics are esoteric, but because the chapters tend to use advanced techniques or knowledge. In fact, some of the material in this section may be very useful, covering such topics as testing, adding methods to system classes, and customizing your development environment.

The book includes a comprehensive index. I've always been frustrated when I know a book contains the information I want, but I can't find it. So I hope this index proves to be less frustrating than some. However, some chapters, such as those on Collections, Streams, Object, and Meta-Programming, make passing references to a lot of messages, and I will not duplicate those references in the index.

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Computer Programming using GNU Smalltalk

By Canol Gokel

Computers are machines composed of hardware and software written for the hardware. Whether you are an amateur user who uses his/her computer just to surf the Internet or an average user who uses computer for daily tasks, you may need to write a program for a specific duty. Maybe you are just a curious user who wants to dominate the box in front of him before it starts dominating you. Programming is the key word here because you make the computer do what you want by programming it. Programming is like putting the soul inside a body.

This book intends to teach you the basics of programming using GNU Smalltalk programming language. GNU Smalltalk is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 programming language and Smalltalk family is in general a little bit different than other common programming languages like C or Java. So, we will apply a different approach to teach you programming compared to other computer programming books out there.

You will see chapters of this book are mostly short compared to other programming books. This is because of mainly two reasons. First one is my laziness. Second one is that Smalltalk is a small and orthogonal language. By small, we mean there are fewer programming concepts you should learn compared to other languages. Smalltalk is built on a few carefully designed rules and concepts. By orthogonality, we mean there are very few exceptions on Smalltalk compared to other languages. Because of this two reasons you will learn almost the whole language in less than 100 pages.

This doesn't mean the things you can do with Smalltalk is limited. In contrast, this small set of rules and orthogonality gives you great flexibility so that the only limit is your imagination. Also, one of the greatest strength of Smalltalk is its powerful and rich library which gives you most of the tools you need out-of-the-box. GNU Smalltalk adds even more tools to this valuable toolbox. But because we will concentrate in the core language in this first edition of the book we are going to show you only the tip of the iceberg, namely, only the most important and most frequently used functionality of the library. If you are an experienced programmer who wants to learn Smalltalk, then you will be surprised by the elegance of this carefully implemented language. Andrew S. Tanenbaum says: "Fight Features. ...the only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small.". Smalltalk is certainly designed by scientists with this mentality in mind.

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A Little Smalltalk

By Timothy Budd

With the help of this smalltalk book you will learn

• The basic concepts of smalltalk language; namely object, method, class, inheritance and overriding.
• The syntax for literal objects and the syntax for message.
• Little smalltalk standard library
• Syntax for defining classes
• Development of an application in smalltalk and describes how environments can be saved and restored.
• Syntax for cascaded expressions and notion of primitive expressions.
• Simulation of an ice cream store, illustrating the ease with which simulations can be described in Smalltalk.
• Concepts of generators, show how generators can be used in soultion of problems requiring goal directed evaluation
• Graphics in smalltalk.
• Concepts of processes and semaphores.
• Features of smalltalk interpreter
• Internal representation of objects in little smalltalk system.
• Techniques used to represent methods internally in the little smalltalk system
• Detailed view of central component of little smalltalk system, process manager.
• Actions of the interpreter and the courier in executing bytecodes and passing messages.

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