Introduction To Smalltalk Book Notes

Smalltalk books are a great way to learn Object-oriented programming, because it helps rewire how you think about objects. Currently recapping my object-oriented programming knowledege with the help of Smalltalk An Introduction to Application Development using VisualWorks.

Introduction to Smalltalk chapter

Most implementations of Smalltalk provide a programming environment, a library of classes and a persistent object store.

Smalltalk has an unusual syntax because it has no notion of "type", everything is an object, including integers, booleans, floating point numbers, characters, strings and arrays etc. Objects are also used to represent display items such as menus, windows, and even the compiler itself..

The rules of Smalltalk syntax are simple and consistent. When you have mastered these rules and have gained a certain familiarity, its a straightforward language to both read and write.

Smalltalk has a lot of classes and methods. Some examples include:

• Various subclasses of Number (including Integer, Float and Fraction).
• Various data structures (including Set, Bag, Array, OrderedCollection, sortedCollection and Dictionary).
• Classes to represent text, font, color etc.
• Geometric representations (Point,Rectangle, Circle, Polygon etc).
• Process and Semaphore classes which help in the control of concurrency (no idea what this bit means yet).