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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