Smalltalk and Object Orientation: an Introduction - Free

Finally, you should see an inspector window displayed. Try clicking on some of the left hand items.
The left hand view of the window shows instance variables (such as tally) and positions (e.g. 1 - 7)
and the right shows the contents of the variables (e.g. the string ‘John’).
Here is a quest ion for you to ponder on and experiment with: “ What happens when the 8th item is
added to this set?” 7 .
5.8 Summary
By now you have used a number of Smalltalk tools, run VisualWorks (or whatever Smalltalk system
you are using) and written some Smalltalk code. Y ou have also had the chance to use some of the tools
available to help you debug your code. You are now ready for the Smalltalk language itself!
5.9 Further reading
If you are going to do any serious development in Smalltalk then you should consider obtaining at least
Vol. 1. of Inside Smalltalk [Lalonde and Pugh 1991] (which concentrates on the language) if not Vol. II.
[Lalonde and Pugh 1991b] (which concentrates on the graphical facilities).
However, by far my own favorite book is [Hopkins and Horan 1995]. This is a very good
introductory book on Smalltalk using the VisualWorks 2.0 system. Indeed it is based closely on the
courses that were run by the University of Manchester by the authors and by the commercial suppliers
of VisualWorks. This means that the material in the book has been “debugged” over a number of years.
In particular it covers much of the same material as is in Part II of this book but spends much more time
on the use of the graphical facilities in Smalltalk. It also goes into a great deal of detail about the tools
in VisualWorks and how to use. However it does not cover issues such as ‘what is object orientation in
much detail’, nor does it attempt to guide the novice through the application of object orientation to
developing a system.
7
Answer: it grows. Try it for yourself - remember to use the inspector to examine the con tents of the set.
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