Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
A Sorted Collection

Written for Smalltalk programmers, this book is designed to help readers become more effective Smalltalk developers and object technology users.

Kent Beck (Author)

9780521644372, SIGS

Paperback, published 28 December 1998

428 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.57 kg

"Kent Beck can pack more practical experience into one pithy maxim than most writers can do in a whole page." --James Rumbaugh

Over the last ten years Kent Beck has written dozens of technical papers for the Smalltalk community, earning himself a reputation as both a gifted writer and thinker. Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk, is a collection of his best work from Object Magazine, The Smalltalk Report, Dr Dobbs Journal, and more. Each article has a new introduction that takes a retrospective view of the writing. Topics include: idioms and environments; methods and metamodels; architecture and pattern languages, objects, classes, inheritance, and all things Smalltalk. Nowhere else can one obtain such a complete collection of Beck's writing. While demonstrating the elegance of Smalltalk and how some of its most powerful features can be exploited profitably, this collection also illuminates breakthrough concepts in object-oriented development. This book is for Smalltalk programmers and anyone working in object-oriented software development.

1. Foreword
2. Preface
3. Introduction
Part I. The Smalltalk Report: 4. Why study Smalltalk idioms?
5. The dreaded super
6. Abstract control idioms
7. ValueModel idioms
8. Collection idioms: standard classes
9. An Objectworks/Smalltalk 4.1 wrapper idiom
10. A short introduction to pattern language
11. Instance-specific behavior: how and why
12. Instance-specific behavior: Digitalk implementation and the deeper meaning of it all
13. To accessor or not to accessor?
14. Inheritance: the rest of the story
15. Helper methods avoid unwanted inheritance
16. It's not just the case
17. Where do objects come from? Part 2
18. Where do objects come from? from variables and methods
19. Birds, bees, and browsers - obvious sources of objects
20. Using patterns: design
21. Simple Smalltalk testing
22. Architectural prototype: television remote control
23. Demand loading for Visual Works
24. Garbage collection revealed
25. What? what happened to garbage collection
26. Super +1
27. Clean code: pipe dream or state of mind?
28. A modest meta proposal
29. Use of variables: temps
30. Variables of the world
31. Farewell and a wood pile
Part II. Object Magazine: 32. Development environments
33. Whole lotta Smalltalk: the technology
34. CRC: finding objects the easy way
35. Distributed Smalltalk
36. Patterns 101
Part III. JOOP: 36. Constructing abstractions for object-oriented applications
Part IV. Other papers: 37. A diagram for OO programs, OOPSLA 1986
38. A laboratory for teaching OO thinking, OOPSLA '89
39. Playground: a programming language for children of all ages, OOPSLA '89
40. Think like an object, UNIX Review, Oct. 1991
41. Writing more valuable objects with patterns, Dr. Dobbs, Feb 1993.

Subject Areas: Object-oriented programming [OOP UMN]