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.

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.