Customer Reviews

Smalltalk 80: The Language

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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This book contains all the theory of object orientation you will ever need. It clear, brilliantly ordered, and besides this, it's refined and exquisite to read. There is a high chance you will have a great time reading it, even if you have spent years programming in other object oriented languages but Smalltalk.
I think it's also a "must" if you work with any object oriented language.
The fact that it's been written 20 years ago it's unimportant for me, because this book addresses mostly theoretical issues regarding Object Orientation.
So my humble advice is, if you want to really understand objects, know what a meta-class inherits from or what is a Behavior, and have fun on the way, read this book.
Some old friends of mine used to say: "it is the only computing science book there is" :)

I suppose everyone who uses Smalltalk should have a copy of this book, even if it's just to sit on the shelf, though you will of course get more repect if you have the older out-of-print version (S.80- The language and its implementation).

There are two problems with the book for a Smalltalk user of today:

1) The book was written a long time ago, and Smalltalk pioneered a lot of concepts in programming languages and IDEs, so very often the terms used for various things are not the terms we would use today; This makes for a confusing read at times.

2) The book is not very helpful from a practical point of view, if you are a new Smalltalk programmer struggling to get to grips with the class library because nearly every implementation these days has a plethora of non-standard extensions which obviously aren't covered, so what you are left with is a guide to the language syntax, which of course famously fits on one page of A4, and a brief look at some of the standard collection classes.

Bottom line: Buy this book to help Goldberg and Robson, because we owe them, read it, then go back to your implementation's help pages.

"Smalltalk/80 - The Languaje" is not only a clasical book, it's a very modern book. Most of the content is incredible actual and very funny to read.

You can't say "I know Smalltalk" if you don't read it.

Learning Smalltalk, and reading this book in particular, solidified my object oriented development foundation. This is a must read for any C++/Java/.NET/Objective C developer. Chances are slim you'll use Smalltalk commercially these days but the concepts laid out here remain true and are widely used across many modern languages some 30+ years after they were born. If you are looking to round out your experience, build perspective, and solidify concepts in your mind; add this to your library and read it. Quick read, easy to follow examples, well worth the money.