The Smalltalk green book, Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice text is now online. Also, the now discontinued SharpDevelop book Disecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop is now available for download.
Two Developer Books Now Online: Smalltalk and SharpDevelop
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
From a slashdot post, found this:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html
http://www.techbooksforfree.com/
There are a whole bunch of Smalltalk books online at http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/FreeBooks.html
Also if you want to check out the twenty plus different versions of Smalltalk talk check out: http://www.Smalltalk.org/versions
To learn more about Smalltalk visit:
http://Smalltalk.org
If you are into 3-d environments then you’ll want to check out the amazing OpenCroquet at:
http://www.OpenCroquet.org
Smalltalk is continuing it’s evolution. Get involved, and evolve it where you need or want it to take you.
Smalltalk, Objects, and Design is a great book on that list that covers the basics of OO in depth using Smalltalk to illustrate the principles.
http://books.iuniverse.com/viewbooks.asp?isbn=1583484906&page=fm1
That doesn’t require registration to download?
That could be made available from repositories?
rpm would be nice.
It’s so boring / frustrating
registering and downloading some huge package
only to find out – you can’t make it run in one go
or make it run at all.
If only there was something cute for Linux like
Dolphin Smalltalk – things would be pretty peachy.
Yeah ok I might test-drive Cincom.
But I’ve given up on VisualAge.
Again shame there isn’t anything as remotely easy to run / install as say Benoit’s Gambas – he did an amazing job for “Basic”.
Running that is a breeze.
Why not something similar for Smalltalk?
Why I don’t start a project myself?
I can’t get my head round SmallTalk yet –
and a perfect IDE should be written in its own language.
A ST specialist should do it.
Gambas was written in Gambas’ Basic.
SharpDevelop was writen in C#
Dolphin was written in Smalltalk.
What’s wrong with Squeak?
Depending on your goal, Squeak’s purty neat, and trivial to install. And it doesn’t get much “purer” being as Squeak is fork of the original Apple ST-80 (I remember playing with that one Fat Mac back in ’85 — WOW!). Apple’s ST-80 was a port from the original Xerox system Back In The Day.
The Green Book is a great book talking about early implementations of ST from folks like Apple, HP, and Tektronix. It’s great that these are made available.
It’s not an IDE in the classical sense, but have you considered Squeak? I don’t know of any other good open source IDEs for Smalltalk.
http://www.squeak.de/EsugcD.html
“ESUG has assembled a CD-ROM with smalltalk systems, books and tutorials.
The CD-ROM contains the following Smalltalk Systems as Test/Full/Non Commercial Version:
* VisualWorks 7.2.1 NC
* IBM VisualAge Smalltalk
* Dolphin
* Smalltalk/X
* GnuSmalltalk 2.1.8
* F-Script
* Squeak 3.6
* SharpSmalltalk
* SmalltalkMT
* Ambrai Smalltalk Beta
* Gemstone
* Strongtalk ”
There’s also just a Squeak version.
the dissecting C#.. i’ve been looking for that book for quite awhile now and was floored when i saw it was just released into the wild like this.. reading now.. only on page 27 thou..
Some pro-ST told me he wouldn’t reccomend squeak for whatever reasons – I forgot.
I think he said it was more for children.
Is Squeak Java based?
If not – I can always have a look at it.
Dolphin seems to run on Wine and Win4Lin .. but that is not the same.
Anyway just expressing – such a shame you guys haven’t come up with a GPL SmallTalk IDE for Linux already.
Fancy depriving all these aspiring programmers and students – now new to Linux – a decent Smalltalk enviroment. tut-tut!
Yeah, I just started reading it too. The cool thing about this book is that it’s not just some toy editor that someone conjured up to fill in a book, but a full-fledged IDE that was written way into development. It’s nice to see the developers reflect on design decisions and various implementation techniques in the real world.
I submitted the Smalltalk book too because it’s somewhat similiar in its real-world historical view and I enjoy reading about computer history.
I’ve met Squeak (am implementing a JVM on it – not on my own volition mind you, but as part of a class project). After 4 months of tooling with it, I still have mixed feelings. Here’s a few rants:
* Squeak is Smalltalk-based. There’s no Java in it.
* It came out of Disney, and there are still people that think it’s great for children. You can take a look at squeakfoundation.org for details.
* Morphic (Squeak’s GUI libraries) is weird. Developing interfaces with it is a bit different from most other GUI toolkits I’ve used. I don’t say that it’s necessarily a bad thing – but it will take a little bit to get used to, and I did not find any good tutorials for what I wanted to do, which made getting used to it even harder.
* Documentation! Some of the Squeak classes are documented. Some are not. Nearly none of the code is, and there is no API documentation that I am aware of (no, I do not consider the System Browser to be an API documentation).
As far as repositories go, there is an up-to date Debian apt package for Squeak. I assume that rpms are also available.
Squeak is a reall Smalltalk implementation, but it is definitely geared at the novice. Mind you, I don’t consider that a bad thing at all. It might not be a pro-level native-code Smalltalk compiler, or traditionally strong Smalltalk IDE features, but for those learning the language, it has a very easy to use standard library, and you can get started with things like media and 3D very quickly. It’s far more interesting to learn a language that way, than to keep doing console applications
Hi,
Squeak’s Morphic isn’t the typical GUI. It sure it’s standard, but it’s not boring either! Remember that the GUI was, to a very large degree, invented in Smalltalk and Squeak’s Morphic seems to be an attempt to continue that innovative tradition. OpenCroquet surely pushes it forward.
You’ll find standard Windows style GUIs in a number of the commercial Smalltalks such as Smalltalk/MT, Dolphin, Cincom and IBM’s Smalltalks. I likely missed a few but check them out at:
http://www.Smalltalk.org/versions
All the best,
Peter
from what I remember from the sharpdevelop forums the book had become (very?) out of date with the current code.
Squeak has nothing to do with Java, there’s no relationship whatsoever (save whatever generic Smalltalk influences ended up in Java).
Squeak is a fascinating project.
It’s written in 100% Smalltalk. It has a compiler for a subset of Smalltalk so it can be compiled in C. This C version is compiled by a native compiler for the core kernel in the runtime for obvious performance reasons. But the actual development etc. is done in Smalltalk.
It has a direct line of heritage back to the original Xerox Smalltalk. If you read the bits in The Green Book, it talks about how Xerox worked with different companies with Smalltalk. One of those companies (obviously) was Apple. Apple took the original Smalltalk image, and got a runtime working on the Macintosh. (And the rest is history…) I’ve seen that version of Smalltalk, and I may well in fact actually still have it on a decomposing floppy somewhere, having seen it back in ’85. This Smalltalk is the classic “Blue Book” Smalltalk. The Blue, Green, and Orange Smalltalk books all talk about this version of Smalltalk.
A research team at Apple resurrected this image, rewrote the kernel and a Smalltalk->C compiler, and started to port it. The original version of Squeak was basically that Smalltalk image, only now it was portable to Mac, PC, Unixen, etc. Later that team moved on to Disney.
Now, their goal for Squeak is towards basically a very rich multimedia authoring environment.
And whan I say “they”, there are two people that stand out in that team. Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls. I would hope that you’ve heard of Alan Kay, most certainly one of THE “names” in modern computing. Dan was the “right hand man” who worked with Alan in getting Smalltalk developed. The third big Smalltalk name is not, as far as I know, involved in Squeak: Adele Goldberg. She was basically involved more in the commercialization of Smalltalk and key in ParcPlace Systems and what is now VisualWorks.
So while it may seem funky and odd, Squeak is, for lack a better word, the “purest” of the modern Smalltalks, because it’s still being molded in the image of what its creator was truly looking for when it was created in the first place.
You can take the Orange and Blue books and they will all basically work in Squeak (notably once you turn off Mophic and resurrect the original interface). Most modern Smalltalks tossed that GUI and even the core basic MVC model aside LONG ago (for good reason).
I argue that some of the oldest, “living” code in distribution is today in Squeak. I don’t know for sure, but it would not surprise me if there is source code in the Squeak image that was last changed in the mid to late 70’s. Remember that unlike most other modern Smalltalks, Squeak is based off the original Smalltalk-80 image, and they only rewrote parts of the kernel, not the entire system from scratch.
There may well be such lines of code in the BSD source tree as well. Either way, it’s an interesting legacy.
That’s was a fascinating story. Thanks for sharing it!
OK, some quick notes:
1. VisualAge and Visualworks have nothing to do with each other (aside from being S80 and ‘corporate’).
2. I find Squeak very un-accessible. Its UI is weird, its presentation is unfocused. It’s all very well, but I just do not think it’s newbie friendly. Visualworks is, in my opinion. Of course, if you don’t you want to prgram but rather to assemble an application from powerful modules, then it’s great.
3. I find the System Browser to be great documenation, if only the code agrees to good Smalltalk style. Also, if you’re burrowing through methods to find out just what class is the object some method returns, then you’re probably not really into Smalltalk.