Customer Reviews

Advanced Smalltalk

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

My initial feeling was that this book would fill a market niche. There are many introductory books on Smalltalk but one that takes you beyond the usual material seemed to be missing.

With this expectation I found the book quite disappointing. Most of the chapters are not advanced at all. In an attempt to cover everything with the book most individual chapters tell so little and do not hit the point (e.g., patterns & frameworks) that they are next to being useless.

When the opportunity to become advanced is there (e.g., comparing "is-a" vs. "subclassing" vs. "subtyping") useful references are not mentioned and the subject is not explored sufficiently. In addition, quite a number of wrong information is contained. Occasionally, useful information is available but the most useful part is the accompanying CD-ROM.

Overall, disappointing. A different title (e.g., "The world of Smalltalk" alluding to the version comparisons and superficial discussion of many related topics) would probably create the right expectations. The book, however, consistently compares solutions and points out differences in four different Smalltalk products. This makes it attractive to someone trying to make a decision for a particular product.

There is very little "advanced" material in this book. This book contains lots of useful intro material for beginners and some moderately advanced material for those progressing out of the beginner stage. Be forewarned, however...half the book is composed of useless filler - a hierarchical dump of all of the classes in several different dialects. This was obvioulsy put in to bulk the book up by a few hundred pages and a couple of pounds.

The book promises so much and its list of topis is very good. But all its chapters are short and there is a general lack of insightful views. For advanced techniques, get Alec Sharp's book. For a strong design foundation, get Lui's book. This one will frustate you mostly. It has a good coverage of the difference among the different Smalltalk dialects, but this is far behind what the author could have done.

I learned a lot from this book. It's not often that a technical book is also readable (some parts more than others). I agree that a different title would be better.

It represents an archive of Smalltalk circa 1996. We used the HTTP server code on our project. The book has information in it that couldn't be found anywhere else.

I have skimmed or read various other books covering this subject. To my surprise this book truly delivers sufficient syntax to better grasp the Smalltalk language. I would definitely recommend this book to any user interested in a well written and well conveyed book.

What this book does differently from all other books on a specific programming language is to illustrate the differences among several commercial implementations in a comparative approach. This could be of interest to smalltalk developers that want to "see" beyond the specific development tool they are using, and have a more "universal" understanding of the Smalltalk language. I was somewhat disappointed overhall because some chapters did not provide any useful information, either because they were only five pages long ("Frameworks") or because they were a plain listing of classes 80 pages long ("Class Listing"). Also, the chapter on "Packaging" a runtime distribution has incorrect information, but the Author should not be blamed for this, since even a commercial vendor's manuals easily have incorrect information in this topic.

Overall this book is probably worth including in your library. However, I found some of the topics to be not so "advanced" (and I've only been doing this for a year or so) and much of the information is mostly summary in nature and can be gleaned from the Manuals that come with your Smalltalk. On the other hand, there is a great deal of information on the various Smalltalks available and if you want to build a Smalltalk http client/server or a Neural network, this is the book.