CuisCoookBook-References

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  • Since then end of 2021 Cuis has its own Web site . Keep an eye on that.
  • Since 2022 Cuis has monthly meetings which are also recorded. The man who made this possible is Hilaire Fernandes. Meeting are open to beginners. We

What follow is not just a list of books and media, it is what I personally used and in some case I am still using to learn Smalltalk and Cuis-Smalltalk in particular. I follow the same order in which I discovered/red/used the resource.

ATTENTION. A lot of books listed below are available for free here, a collection made by Stephane Ducasse (the founder of Pharo).  I prefer to buy the printed copy anyway but having the possibility of reading the pdf in the iPad at night or before buying the printed copy is a great thing. I big merci to Stephan, there is a donate button on the page.

  • Learn Smalltalk with ProfStef. You can do it online now here, when I red it was a sequence of instruction to run into a Pharo Workspace.
  • Squeak by Example. Squeak is a father of all open source Smalltalk. Download the most recent release.
  • Squeak open personal computing and multimedia, by Guzdial & Rose. Two books, really outdated but good to have an idea of what you can do (and you could do in early 2000 with Smalltalk).
  • StackOverflow. There I got some questions answered when I was at the very beginning. A special thank you here goes to Leandro Caniglia who was willing to give me the very first directions when I was just trying to copy and past code chunks (wrong attitude for Smalltalk).
  • The Squeak Swiki. This is kind of MediaWiki for Squeak. You can find a lot of useful information there. But beware, some of it is outdated. Put more value on the concepts and explanations than on the code snippets.
  • The Squeak mailing list. This is a developer list, but you may find somebody who is willing to assist you moving the first steps, in my case it was Hannes Hirzel.
  • The Cuis-Smalltalk mailing list. This is a developer list but again, somebody may have time to assist you moving the first steps. In my case these people were mostly: Juan Vuletich (the founder of Cuis), Gerald Klix, Dave T. Lewis, Ken Dickey.
  • Learning Cuis. A lot of useful things.
  • Cuis Documentation directory, see here.
  • Smalltalk by Example by Alec Sharp. If you are good at programming in at least another language this book is a must.
  • Inside Smalltalk by Lalonde & Pugh. Really good book. There are 2 volumes. I red mostly Vol.1.
  • The Cuis Book. This is a book aimed at beginners and not programmers, it comes from the Cuis community. If you find it after you already red a lot of stuff it may still be an interesting reading because it talks about things specific about Cuis e.g. Packages and VectorGraphics.
  • Byte Magazine August 1981 issue is fully dedicated to Smalltalk. There are several articles touching different topics. A must have, It is still referenced today.
  • Smalltalk, an introduction to application development using VisualWorks by Hopkins and Horan. Another excellent book comparable with "Smalltalk by Example" maybe a bit lighter.
  • The Hitchhiker's guide to the Smalltalk Compiler by Vassili Bykov. You can find a version in the Cuis Documentation, here.
  • VisualWorks documentation. Cincom VisualWorks is a commercial Smalltalk with a long history, there is possibility to have a PUL (personal use license). I was able to install it in Linux (there are some nasty difficulties setting the GUI scaling) and I discovered the pdf documentation that comes with the software. It is really amazing, a work very well done. You may start reading from the file AppDevGuide.pdf .

Book that still I could not read well or very partially

  • Smalltalk-80, the language and its implementation by Goldberg and Robson. Called The Blue Book, it is considered a bible. It is not what you want to use to learn how to program in Cuis, at least at the beginning.
  • ... there is a collection of little books I was told about, made at the end of the '90. At the moment i don't remember the title but they have a huge reputation.