Customer Reviews

Smalltalk With Style

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4 star:		(2)
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This is a great book, it really is. The only potential for disappointment is if you think this book will teach you smalltalk -- it will not. This book is about good programming convensions in smalltalk -- it's about style and consistency and clarity. All this may sound too trivial to merit a book, but consider the following:

You will not find many people that program in smalltalk and you will not be able to see a lot of code. This means that your coding style will take longer to develop *naturally*, on your own. This is where Smalltalk With Style comes in: It's a small book and makes simple and easy reading. When you're done with it, you'll put it aside and most likely never refer to it again. But it will change the way you write code in smalltalk, and your code will begin to look the way smalltalk code should. The advantage of this book is that it packs invaluable programming experience in a wonderful, but not-so-popular programming language into a very small book. Get it, read it, get over with it, and go on to write code like a natural smalltalker.

This is one of two or three "must have" books that every person interested in or practicing Smalltalk needs to read and keep on a shelf near by. This book will teach you everything you need to know about writing clear and concise Smalltalk code. The author, Ed Klimas, is one of the most well known Smalltalk guru's around.

This books, short and to the point of what to do and what not to do with SmallTalk. Simple, and concise, the book covers issues of style that actually can and do apply to anyone who is interested in creating and leaving quality code in place for others to learn from and prosper. Almost a book about Code Karma.

Smalltalk with Style is an absolute must for any software engineer's bookshelf. Being practical and easy to navigate, the book directly addresses the day-to-day, "where the rubber hits the road" needs of our designers and programmers. We have found its pearls of hard-sought wisdom invaluable to the success of our object-oriented development teams.

This slim book does not waste any time in giving the essentials to good Smalltalk programming practices. From how to name classes and format your code, to testing tips, you should be able to improve your classes after reading through this book. The guidelines which follow each point are clear and relevant. (My alltime favorite is "Don't perform brain surgery on yourself"; it refers to modifying the Base System Classes.) This book, along with David Smith's "Smalltalk The Language" definitely belongs next to every Smalltalker's PC.

This book is clearly the product of authors who have extensive practical development experience with Smalltalk. It focuses on what developers can really do in real projects to improve the quality and comprehensibility of their code. It is a very small book, you could read it over a weekend--and it will amply repay your efforts. In addition to being useful to developers who care about their code, *Smalltalk With Style* can serve as the basis for a project-specific "style guide"--thus I recommend it for project managers. For those of you who are novice Smalltalk programmers, this will help you become experts faster--read it, meditate on why the recommendations make sense, ask the experts what they think; the exercise of doing this will help you to understand Smalltalk better.

This slim volume is an essential tool for anyone creating Smalltalk applications. Ed Klimas and his colleagues (who helped create the ENVY development environment of VisualAge) have crafted a very carefully constructed guide not only to Smalltalk that is readable, but also code that is very powerful. No person writing in Smalltalk can be without it, and people serious about object-oriented coding in Java or C++ should give it a look, since many of the principles are very relevant to any OO language.