[geeks] Object Oriented Programming Books.

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 04:29:46PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> If that's what you want to do then you really need to learn some really
> truly 100% object oriented language first -- i.e. smalltalk.  Download
> Squeak (www.squeak.org) and get to work!  You can't help but learn OO
> concepts if you use smalltalk because that's the only way to do things
> in smalltalk.

In my opinion Squeak is cool, but it is also seriously overwhelming.
Their focus seems to no longer be a reasonably small OO language to
being an extremely bleeding edge multimedia development system.  It
comes with insane amounts of stuff included, from 3D animation tools, to
speach synthesizers, to all sorts of education stuff (for young kids), a
lip syncing system, web server, a wiki system, video IO, audio IO, music
synthesis, and on and on and on.  The short of it is that Squeak isn't a
simple language, but rather it is Alan Kays playground.

I have a half started project or two in Squeak, but for generally
fiddling, and for general increased likely hood of getting something
done, I'd look to GNU Smalltalk.  It is under active development, even
though it manages to appear like it isn't.  I wish 2.0.8 would come out.
It adds better Solaris and Irix support (meaning that it is supposed to
fix the immediate bus errors ones gets on those platforms). The hold up
seem to be a machine failure on the part of the lead maintainer.  
 
> Joshua posted a link to a place with online smalltalk books just the
> other day, IIRC.  There are lots and lots of other good smalltalk books
> still in print, and new ones coming out every few months too.
> 
> Ruby is a possible alternate, though it can too easily be used as a
> plain procedural language.

Python is cool in my opinion, but it too can be easily used as a
procedural language.  Ruby left me feeling cold for some reason.

However, those languages don't tend to reveal how mind blowing OO can be
as quickly as smalltalk does.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd