Customer Reviews

Squeak: Object-Oriented Design with Multimedia Applications

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

 

 

As the author of several Smalltalk books myself, I tend to be a bit skeptical of new books about Smalltalk. But Mark Guzdial's excellent first book on the best Smalltalk implementation on the planet, Squeak, earns my highest respect. It is organized the way I suspect most people trying to learn a new language like such books organized. Rather than beginning with abstract concepts and then hoping you will be able to use those concepts to solve specific problems, Guzdial takes a practical, project-based approach.

This book does not purport to cover basic object-oriented design and programming paradigms but in fact it does at least an adequate job even for a relative beginner. It is clearly aimed at someone who has at least a smattering of programming training or experience, but you don't really need much to derive great value from the book.

It is true that since the book was released there is a newer version of Squeak, but the good news is that the author had the foresight to include on the accompanying CD-ROM the version of the language on which he relied to make the book examples work. I've been working with the newer version for some time but reverting to the older version for the purpose of the book wasn't difficult or painful.

I believe that Squeak IS the future of all kinds of computing and development, including the Internet/Web world, and it will behoove you to learn this wonderful language sooner than later. There is simply no better way to do that than to start with Guzdial's work. He's the prototypical teacher and the book is marvelous.

Good books for people wanting to get started in Smalltalk are hard to find. Particularly, those that are connected to a viable programming environment. This book is excellent on both counts. The associated Squeak programming environment is a solid Smalltalk-80 implementation that is being moved in new directions by a team at Squeak Central, now at Disney, led by Dr. Alan Kay whose team contains several of the early developers of Smalltalk. Dr. Kay also invented the concept of the DynaBook. Mark Guzdial's team is also working on a Collaborative DynaBook at Georgia Tech. Thus, this book is also a entry point into two hotbeds of R&D in leading-edge computing technology. Welcome to the future! Note: Squeak is free on a number of popular platforms.

If you do not yet know Squeak or Smalltalk:

1. Download the current version of Squeak from squeak.org (the version on the CDROM is not the latest and greatest)!

2. Buy this book, read it and learn to Squeak!

3. Order the other book (not yet published) about Squeak edited by Mark Guzdial!

otherwise: do the same!

In both cases try to ignore the problems with the reproduction of some of the screenshots.

Mark Guzdial has written a book that is good for programmers who love object oriented programming to the core. Its not good for people who are new to Object oriented stuff. Has decent examples and some really cool stuff that can be done with squeak. All in all a decent book

The book is outdated, unclear in its focus, and makes assumptions for the reader. This book provides only a poor intro to Squeak and poorly touches up on OO principles. Liu's Smalltalk book is probably where one would want to start to get both worlds. Worst, this book is used at Ga Tech for a class titled "Objects and Design."

Also, all the previous book reviews on this page were reviews of Squeak and Alan Kay as opposed the book. So their 5 stars are misplaced.

The content is quite useful, and I'd have given it four stars out of five, but the screen captures appear to have been saved and reproduced as JPEG images. This results in the text being almost completely unreadable in some figures, such as 4-16 and 4-17. Even the better-looking figures still show a high level of JPEG artifacts. It's astonishing that this wasn't noticed in galley proofs and corrected.

I've been seeing these problems more frequently in recent books, and even in the local newspaper. Publishers really need to learn that JPEG is only for continous-tone photographs, NOT for line art or text.

This book is one of the early signs of the real computer revolution that is about to start, according to Alan Kay, a visionary from Disney, who, in essence, invented a computer world as we see it now. The book is about the language that is 3 times more productive than Java, and ported to 22 platforms. The language which domination is as inevitable as the dot-com crash. Mark is a member of the inner circle of Squeak development, so his knowledge of Squeak is superior. You will save yourself dozens of hours if you read this book. And this book just a pure fun to read. Get this book, it will change your thinking about computer programming forever.