Smalltalk and Object Orientation: An Introduction

by John Hunt

This book was originally written to support an introductory course in Object Orientation through the medium of Smalltalk (and VisualWorks in particular). However, it can be used as a book to teach the reader Smalltalk, to introduce object orientation as well as present object oriented design and analysis. It takes as its basic premise that most Computer Scientists I Software Engineers learn best by doing rather than from theoretical notes. The chapters therefore attempt to introduce concepts by getting you the reader to do things, rather than by extensive theoretical discussions. This means that these chapters take a hands-on approach to the subject and assume that the student/reader has a suitable Small talk environment available to them. The chapters are listed below and are divided into six parts. The reader is advised to work through Parts 1 and 3 thoroughly in order to gain a detailed understanding of object orientation. Part 2 then provides an introduction to the Smalltalk environment and language. Other chapters may then be dipped into as required. For example, if the reader wishes to hone their Smalltalk skills then the chapters in Part 4 would be useful. However, if at that point they wish to get on and discover the delights of graphical user interfaces in Smalltalk, then Part 5 could be read next. Part 6 presents some more advances subjects such as metaclasses and concurrency which are not required for straight forward Small talk development.

400 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John Hunt (1964), Software specialist.

Reviews

[caisah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book is from 1997 it has a lot of present concepts. If someone doubts the contents, should read the predictions made at the end by the author. It's refreshing to see such a clear expose of ideas.

The book presents mainly the VisualWorks language but it can be translated to any other Smalltalk implementation. Because I didn't use VisualWorks I skipped the chapters about graphical interfaces so I can't comment on those. But all of the others are very concisely written.

The book assumes you have some knowledge of programming so it's not for beginners. Most of the parts try to explain how to adapt to the object orientated mindset and that is done in a very clear manner. All the concepts are there: inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, abstraction, OOD, UML, OMT, MVC, Testing, Idioms and also explanations for some of the high level concepts of Smalltalk such as Metaclasses.

One shortcoming of the book is the fact that some of the chapters are purely theoretical. There are few code examples.

Other thing I should mention is the bibliography from the end of every chapter. This is something every wannabe architect/programmer should carefully consider. Those books were relevant then, and they are also relevant now, for sure.

I encourage everybody interested in Smalltalk and OO to give this book a try.