Customer Reviews

Art and Science of Smalltalk, The

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Simon Lewis's book "The Art and Science of Smalltalk" has to be one of the best books on Smalltalk programming I have ever read. After spending months reading many other books on the subject and still not getting a clear, concise description of some important Smalltalk constructs, I could not believe how incredibly readable this book was. Lewis has managed to explain in a few pages what took other authors multiple chapters.

In addition, diagrams and figures are only used when they will actually help the reader to understand a concept. Unlike other texts references to figures and diagrams occur in close proximity to them rather than twenty pages before or after.

The book is divided into two parts which address different but equally important aspects of programming in Smalltalk. The first section deals with the "science" of Smalltak and covers the development environment, class library, and dependency mechanisms (Model-View-Controller Architecture). The second section gives sage advice on the "art" of Smalltalk. This includes sections on how to best utilize Smalltalk in an environment of extensive reuse, management of Smalltalk projects, and debugging techniques.

I would rate this book as a must have for Smalltalk programmers at any level. If I were to teach a course in Smalltalk this book would be required. Lewis should be commended for his command of the Smalltalk language and his eloquence in explaining it to others.<P

Very good overview of the Smalltalk system and how do design, structure and debug in Smalltalk. Excellent introduction and side reference as I go through examples and tutorials from elsewhere. Good explanations of *why* some things are done the way they are and introductions to some of the unique or nearly so features of Smalltalk.

The book is well organized, well written and clear. It's not a "programming language book": it will actually show you some great ideas about object orientation. The first half of the book teaches you Smalltalk (and the model-view-controller framework) and also helps show how important this language is to you if you *really* are into OOP. The second part is about best practices in design, implementation, testing and debugging.

The book focuses on VisualWorks Smalltalk, but it is OK if you are using some other Smalltalk implementation such as Squeak, for example, since most of the time it won't get into incompatible details.

I do recommend this to anyone interested in programming, and very strongly to those interested in OOP in general (not just Smalltalk).

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