Book cover of Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

Book description

This classic book is the definitive real-world style guide for better Smalltalk programming. This author presents a set of patterns that organize all the informal experience successful Smalltalk programmers have learned the hard way. When programmers understand these patterns, they can write much more effective code. The concept of Smalltalk…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Smalltalk is not as common or popular as it once was, but the influence its design had on programming is hard to overstate.

Reading this book has changed how I think about object orientation, and how I design systems, learning the patterns of Smalltalk makes it clear what object oriented design is really intended to achieve.

While Smalltalk has been relegated to a tiny niche in the field of currently-used programming languages, I loved the opportunity to work with it many years ago. Smalltalk, an object-oriented language, is powerful but conceptually simple – you can learn the syntax in about 15 minutes. You can also produce highly expressive, clearly-stated yet compact code in Smalltalk.

In Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Kent Beck took the approach of expressing each recommendation in the form of an "implementation pattern:" a named technique that provides a recipe for addressing coding problems. Each pattern is short and sweet – you can…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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