Smalltalk by Kent Beck I read this book at the recomendation of the lead rails developer at metova, Logan Serman.

This book was interesting primarily as it provided perspective into recent history of Object Oriented Development. I think that Ruby and Rails internally nail many of the things that Kent Beck was describing in this book, and a good Rails developer will find that many of the items in this book should go without saying. It is interesting to see them desicribed as competely novel. This is the beginnings of Object Orientation done right. It was a bit of a challenge to read a book in a language I have very little likelihood of ever using. At least with reading [Kernighan and Ritchie C] there is a virtual gaurantee of someday having cause to write or read it. Smalltalk is larely unused afiak.

The structure of the book exacerbated the impracticality of reading a book on a language I don’t actually use. It’s structure is similar to [Practical vim]; ie. a series of tips. This structure ( and this is described in the preface of the book _ is designed for practical use. Reading this book with the forewknowledge of there being almost no chance of direct application made this book a bit of a challenge to get through.

TLDR: this book held some value into the old school object orientation and the fact that this thinking was very avant garde at one point. Combining this revolutionariness with Kent Becks rather dry writing style is a bit odd. File this one as interesting to learn you history, and perhaps reinforce your OO understanding by viewing it in through the eyes of an early advocate. I accept that SmallTalk was a revolutionary attempt at making Object Oriented Programming better, but it has been left behind, for better or for worse.

I give this book one emphatic ooaaahh? It’s like his other book, [Extreme Prgorariming explained], in that it contains some of the ideas that are very still much at the forefront, and somewhat evolved in their ‘punk’ phase. I imagene that small talk has some things that were foolsihly left behind, as I think Extreme Programming does, but I found little in this book other than a glimpse into the past to the writings of a prophet.