Even though the rest of the world does not take Smalltalk seriously, it does not mean that you shouldn’t. In fact, Smalltalk remains one of the cleanest object oriented languages I have seen. True, getting used to its environment can take some time, but once you have, you will wonder how come you are not programming like this.

Anyway, this book has some good patterns that are useful not only for Smalltalk but for any of the other language that derives indirectly from it. For instance, Java and Ruby share some of the concepts of the Collection class from Smalltalk. Moreover, some simple patterns such as naming methods and classes might seem trivial but if you follow the advice, it will definitely impact the readability of your code. Some of the other patterns are really specific to Smalltalk though and probably will not be useful for other programming languages.

The only drawback of this book is its price. It’s almost $40 for a fairly thin book.

If you want to learn programming in an environment where the source code is available and almost everything is written in the language you are trying to learn, look no further than Smalltalk. Because of its dynamic environment, you can basicallty inspect every line of code in the system, make changes, and see the results.