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.
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.
