The Weekly Squeak

Squeak by Example has been a hugely successful introduction to Squeak since its publication last year, and it has now been made available to a wider audience, following the publication of a French edition Squeak par l’exemple. As with the English edition, the book has been made available in print from print-on-demand specialists lulu.com for around €17/$20/£11, or can be downloaded from the site as a pdf.

Squeak par l’exemple was produced thanks to the hard work of the team of translators: Martial Boniou, Mathieu Chappuis, Luc Fabresse, René Mages, Nicolas Petton, Alain Plantec, Benoît Tuduri and Serge Stinckwich.

Michael Perscheid announced in the Seaside mailing list the publication of a new Seaside book An Introduction to Seaside. He says that:

“This book explains the major concepts of Seaside in a clear and intuitive style. A working example of a ToDo List application is developed to illustrate the framework’s important concepts that build upon each other in an orderly progression. Besides the notions of users, tasks, components, forms and deployment, additional topics such as persistence, Ajax and Magritte are also discussed.”

The book is based on the online tutorial developed at the Hasso-Plattner Institut, and the content has been revised and expanded for this edition.

The 212-page book can be previewed and ordered at online publisher lulu.com for about €20/£14/$25.

Congratulations to all involved at the HPI Software Architecture Group for producing this great introduction to Seaside. They are: David Tibbe, Michael Perscheid, Martin Beck, Stefan Berger, Jeff Eastman, Michael Haupt, Robert Hirschfeld and Peter Osburg.

Stéphane Ducasse maintains a great list of free Smalltalk books including online pdfs of many out-of-print books.

These books span over twenty years of Smalltalk development, and includes great resources such as Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation (the “Blue Book”), Smalltalk with Style(pdf), and more recent classics such as Squeak by Example (written by Stéphane Ducasse along with Andrew P. Black, Oscar Nierstrasz and Damien Pollet).

This is a great resource that is of use to beginners and to more experienced programmers wanting to understand more of the philosophy and design decisions behind Smalltalk and Squeak.

Links and reviews of many other (non-free!) books can be found at the Squeak wiki, John M McIntosh’s site, and Squeakland has a reading list prepared by Alan Kay for those who want to learn more about the ideas and philosophies that influenced the creation of Squeak.

If you know of other books and online resources that should be listed here, please let us know!

[Please note the URL has been updated to address David's comment below. The original URL was an older page with fewer books available.]

Stéphane Ducasse has just announced that the second edition of Squeak By Example has just been published. It is available for download from the Squeak By Example website, or if you prefer paper to phosphors, you can order a hard copy from print-on-demand publishers lulu.com for only €16.18/$20.10/£11.07.

Licensed under the creative commons by-sa licence, the first edition was a great success, with over 20,000 downloads in less than six months. For the second edition, the authors Oscar Nierstrasz, Stéphane Ducasse, Damien Pollet and Andrew P. Black, have reviewed and revised the contents based on feedback from readers.

At over 300 pages, the book is an excellent introduction to developing in Squeak, and the overall organization and choice of topics makes it a great reference work.

Andrés Valloud has just published “Hashing in Smalltalk: Theory and Practice” on Lulu. He describes the book as providing “a strong foundation for hashing, hash functions, and their application in the context of software development. The first part develops hashing and hash functions from first principles. The behavior characteristics required of hash functions are examined in detail. A thorough description of how hash functions are constructed follows, complete with a rich survey of existing hash functions. But often times existing hash functions are inappropriate for the task at hand. To address this problem, the second part shows how to build novel hash functions that are both efficient and of very high quality for many of the types of data that occur in practice.”

The book compares algorithms and implementations of hashing across the main Smalltalks (Squeak, Dolphin, Visual Works and VisualAge), as well as other languages including C, C++, C#, Java, OCaml and ML. It’s available for $40/€32.20/£22.04 .

Andrés has also posted a great illustration of the dangers of the use of inappropriate hashing functions.

Don’t miss this fun new video from Randal Schwartz and Leo about Squeak, EToys and OLPC.  Randal builds a very nice car demo.

The Software Freedom Law Center just released a terrific readable guide to Free Open Source Software Legal Issues.

A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects (html / pdf)

Our thanks to the SFLC and all the terrific people there for their tireless efforts to support open source software communities!

The European Smalltalk Users Group - ESUG has generously agreed to support international smalltalk presentations.

From Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE :

Hi all

as announced at Lugano ESUG is putting in place new action to promote the use of smalltalk http://www.esug.org/promotionactions/publicationpromotion/

PublicationPromotion
ESUG offers 150 Euros for each international conference paper whose concepts involves an implementation in Smalltalk

Rules
• After notification of acceptance, one of the authors sends to the ESUG board the article, a CV, and a brief explanation of how Smalltalk was used
• In case the ESUG board decides to support the promotion, the author has to send to ESUG after the camera-ready deadline a PDF of the article, where ESUG is referenced in the acknowledgment section, including a link to esug.org
• During the presentation at the conference, the author must mention ESUG support
• After the presentation at the conference the author sends to ESUG a PDF version of the slides, where there is a visible reference to ESUG (e.g. theESUG Logo). ESUG will put the slides on the ESUG website
• The author can then trigger the payment by sending an e-Mail to the ESUG board
• A maximum of 3 supported articles per year per institution is allowed

Prof. Stéphane DUCASSE [ | ]
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr

Open Source Smalltalks: http://www.squeak.org, http://www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
Free books for Universities at http://www.esug.org/sponsoring/promotionProgram.html
Online Free Books at http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html

From Hernan Wilkinson:

Hi,

I just wanted to let you know that the Smalltalks 2007 presentations are available at https://www.dc.uba.ar/events/smalltalks/2007/presentaciones
Most of them are in English although not all.
You can look some pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/smalltalks2007 and http://picasaweb.google.com/WeybridgeWay/1erCongresoArgentinoDeSmalltalk

I wanted to give a public “Thanks” to ESUG for their support (DVD, book, ideas, etc), Viewpoints, Dan Ingalls, James Robertson, John Sarkela and Bruce Badger for the videos. Stef and Noury sent me something to read but finally I did not have the time to do it (sorry). Also, to all the sponsors that helped us with the conference.

Below are some comments we got in the Argentine Smalltalk lists (first in Spanish and then in English, translated by Andres Valloud).
It is very hard for me to find the right words to express how happy we are with the outcome of the conference, not only for the amount of people that came but also for their kindness and technical level of the presentations. Thanks to all.

Hernan
Read the rest of this entry »

“The Little Book of Semaphores” by Allen B. Downey has been highly recommended on Squeak-Dev. This is a terrific source for understanding semaphores and learning how to apply them. The book includes puzzles and examples. Visit the Unisex Bathroom or help the Baboons crossing a canyon.