Smalltalk, Object and Design [Hardcover]

The old adage, "Don't judge a book by its cover" rings true with Chamond Liu's "Smalltalk, Objects, and Design". Its pea green, unappetizing exterior does not tempt most to buy...at least, I felt that way when I first spotted the book at a walk-in bookstore. However, I read all the glowing reviews about the book on Amazon, and based upon this, I decided to purchase the book. What can I say ? This book is awesome ! After stumbling through many OO, C++, Smalltalk, you-name-it-OO books in my lifetime, I have finally found THE BOOK which explains so clearly all those fuzzy OO concepts which I never quite understood before. This book is geared towards Smalltalk, and is a great beginner's Smalltalk book. However, even if your goal doesn't include learning Smalltalk - this book is highly advised. It is full of gems and surely has something to teach to even the most seasoned OO professional (regardless of her programming language background). Thank You Mr. Liu for taking the time and effort to write such a terrific book. You have done a great service to the software development community, with this effort. I anxiously await your next book.

My favorite chapter is Chap. 17, entitled "Two kinds of inheritance". It opened my eyes and taught me things that I had never imagined before, and I have read umpteen OO books.

Take my advice - BUY THIS BOOK ! Reading it will give you a huge competitive edge.

When I first looked into this book I thought "Oh well, this is just another book for Smalltalk and OOP beginners". Well I was wrong.

This book starts indeed from the fundamentals (objects and messages) and warns against certain pitfalls that beginners are prone to. It covers a few aspects of the class library, especially container classes as well as the MVC paradigm.

This book strongly focuses on design questions, i.e. "When to buy and when to inherit". It has a great chapter on "Specificaton inheritance" vs. "Implementation inheritance" and a chapter explaining the concept of design patterns as well as giving some example patterns for Smalltalk.

While a Smalltalk beginner might need more books to give a more complete introduction into the class library, this is a good book to expose beginners to the nuances of Smalltalk and OOP. The more advanced will appreciate the nuances in the design discussions especially in the 2nd half of the book.

In summary I can highly recommend this book for beginners and no-longer-beginners alike.

"Smalltalk, Objects, and Design" is such a simple and unexciting title, and yet that's what this book is, in its entirety. This book will teach you about Smalltalk, it will teach you about objects (using Smalltalk as the medium, but you will learn much about Object Oriented programming that is applicable in any language), and it will teach you about good design principles.

It is written in clear, straightforward prose. In each chapter, the author presents a new idea, discusses the reason for that idea and its implementations (and often discusses several alternative solutions to a given problem that have been adopted historically or in other languages, as well), then gives some concrete examples, some exercises to reinforce the point, and then summarizes. I learned a lot of things in this book that I only vaguely understood before. How garbage collection works. How Smalltalk really accomplishes "everything is an object." What "weak references" are and how to use them. How the Model-View-Controller framework works. There are good discussions about inheritance and how to avoid overusing it, implementation of polymorphism, reifying methods, and so on. Good, meaty stuff especially for the beginning OO programmer.

This book talks about Smalltalk from a design perspective, so while there is an introduction to Smalltalk and a lot of examples to help you learn, it really isn't intended to teach the language. If you have no Smalltalk experience at all, the book will teach you enough to follow along, but you'll want another book to go further in the language. It is fairly implementation-neutral; the author uses IBM's VisualAge for his examples, but he provides tables and footnotes when it's necessary to point out the differences with other Smalltalk implementations such as VisualWorks, and as a VisualWorks user myself, nothing in this book threw me off.

Objects are explained in great detail, starting with the hierarchy (in Smalltalk), what classes really are, how inheritance really works, "buying" vs. "inheriting" (i.e., "has-a" vs. "is-a"), abstract classes, Containers, polymorphism, and many other crucial OO concepts. Again, it's focused on Smalltalk but if you do OO-programming in Java or C++ or some other language, there is a lot here that will be useful to learn (and the author even adds footnotes here and there commenting on how certain things are done in C++ or other languages).

The design chapters are good, though not as thorough, as software design is really a vast subject requiring many books in its own right. The author gives brief treatment of a lot of practices covered in much more detail in other books; for example, there is a chapter on design patterns, much of which is adapted from the famous "Gang of Four" book "Design Patterns" (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides). The author talks about CRC cards, UI design, software engineering practices, frameworks, and other topics that can't really be done justice in a chapter each.

If I were teaching a class in Object-Oriented Programming, I would use Smalltalk as the language to teach basic OO concepts, and I would use this book as the text. Even if I had to use Java as the teaching language, I would find a good Java-based book on OO-programming, and supplement it with this one.

The final chapter, "Why Developing Software is Still Hard," was the author's opportunity to digress, and is worthwhile for all new programmers to read. Basically, there is a lot of Object-Oriented Kool-Aid out there, and if you take this chapter to heart, you'll avoid drinking some of it.