Literature
- [1]
Smalltalk-80, the language and implementation
- also known as "the Blue Book" due to its blue cover image.
Written by Adele Goldberg and David Robson, this is the definitive
reference for the smalltalk language - a must in every library.
ISBN 0-201-11371-6 Addison Wesley
- [2]
Smalltalk-80, the language
- also known as "the Purple Book".
A new edition of [1] with some updates but also omissions (implementations,
as the title suggests).
ISBN ? Addison Wesley
- [3]
Smalltalk-80, the interactive programming envronment
- written by Adele Goldberg, also known as "the Orange Book".
Describes the user interface as inthe original Xerox smalltalk implementation.
Not up-to-date, but basic concepts are still as described therein.
ISBN 0-201-11372-4 Addison Wesley
- [4]
Smalltalk-80, bits of history words of advice
- also known as "the Green Book".
Some nice-to-read background information on the history and internals of
early smalltalk implementations.
Not up-to-date, many new research results make some of the articles obsolete.
ISBN 0-201-11669-3 Addison Wesley
- [5]
The design and evaluation of a high performance smalltalk system
- written by David Michael Unger, this book describes many techniques
which are also used in Smalltalk/X (and other modern smalltalk
implementations).
Particularly, the description of generation scavenging garbage collection,
inline caching and lazy evaluation of contexts are valuable.
ISBN 0-262-21010-X Mit Press
- [6]
X3J20 Ansi Smalltalk Language Standard proposal
- a not yet finished standard, which will describe a common language subset
to be implemented (hopefully) by all smalltalk implementations.
- [7]
Inside Smalltalk volume 1
- written by Wilf R. LaLonde & John R. Pugh.
although being outdated somewhat (since it describes an old version of Smalltalk-80),
this book is still a very good reference on the smalltalk language and class library.
Especially, the basic classes (collections, streams, numeric classes etc.)
are described in much detail.
ISBN 0-13-465964-3 Prentice Hall