This is an introduction book to Smalltalk and the Pharo development environment. The book is split in two parts: the first one covers the Smalltalk language, the Pharo IDE, the Morphic package for GUI application and the Seaside framework for web application. The second part is relatively thin and covers more advanced topics such as reflection.
The book is easy to read, with many examples to follow, and the reader will quickly acquire a good comprehension of Smalltalk. The object-oriented concepts specific to Smalltalk are however rigorously discussed. A good example would be the paragraph about class variables in case of a class inheritance: it’s easy to follow in the book but still an OO concept that could be otherwise misunderstood. These paragraphs are the most important one for people (like me) coming from other OO languages.
The GUI and web frameworks are briefly covered but enough to get a idea of how to they work. Both are component-based, and a concrete component is built from A to Z in both cases to get insight about the frameworks.
The second part about reflection is where the beauty of Smalltalk shines. First the concept behing meta-object and reflection are presented and then a few useful patterns which use reflection are described, for instance how to build a dynamic proxy in Smalltalk. This is clearly the most interesting part, where the dynamic nature of Smalltalk can be exploited in a constructive way.
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