About a book on GNU Smalltalk

Hello,

I had an idea back one or two years ago about writing an "absolute beginner to
programming" book which uses GNU Smalltalk as the tool to teach programming. And
I have done a lot of work on it but after my lessons got a little harder at
university now I cannot find time to finish it. Instead of leaving it decay on
one of my folders I decided to post about it and maybe find other volunteers to
complete the book. You can get the draft pdf at:

http://www.canol.info/smalltalk/gnu_smalltalk_book.pdf

It is about 95 pages long. Although maybe 80% of the content is completed there
are also a lot of content to be written. I have annotated the missing parts via
triple brackets for example:

[[[Write here the reason of the output]]]

Some points worth mentioning:

 - I have written the book in OpenOffice.Org but have a positive look for a
rewrite in LaTeX, DocBook or something other but please keep the look of the
current draft as much as possible cause I give importance about the look and
typography.

 - I also give importance about what subjects to mention and in what order but
we can discuss about it later if there are volunteers :)

 - I don't know much about licensing, we might need a person who has knowledge
about the subject.

I think such a book can make GST get attention by a lot of newcomers. Also we
can make it available at Lulu and donate the income to GNU (or GNU Smalltalk
directly?) to help the development.

Are there any volunteers to continue the effort?



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Canol Gokel <canol <at> canol.info> writes:

> ...
> I had an idea back one or two years ago about writing an "absolute beginner
> to
> programming" book which uses GNU Smalltalk as the tool to teach programming.
> And
> I have done a lot of work on it but after my lessons got a little harder at
> university now I cannot find time to finish it.
> ...

With some encouragement after months, I finalized Preface, Chapter 1 and 2
(except the Smalltalk history part of the Chapter 2) by fixing some typos,
entering the missing indexes, removing some unnecessary sentences and arranging
the end of chapter questions and answers. You can download the latest pdf again
from:

http://www.canol.info/smalltalk/gnu_smalltalk_book.pdf

Now, on page 3 you can find the date book lastly updated so that you can
compare if the pdf you got is the latest version.



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Now, Chapter 3 is also finalized. You can get the latest copy again from the URL
on the first message.



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Chapter 4, "Controlling the Flow of Execution" is finalized. You can get the
latest copy, again, at:

http://www.canol.info/smalltalk/gnu_smalltalk_book.pdf



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Canol Gokel <canol <at> canol.info> writes:

>
> Chapter 4, "Controlling the Flow of Execution" is finalized. You can get the
> latest copy, again, at:
>
> http://www.canol.info/smalltalk/gnu_smalltalk_book.pdf
>

Chapter 6 and appendixes are finalized. Also the missing section of Chapter 2 is
written. Only, Chapter 5 left to complete the first edition of the book.



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Great job !

May be can we reuse some part to improve the GST documentation ?
Or as a tutorial ? What will be the licence ? May be we could integrate
it with the GST distribution ?

Cheers,
Gwen

On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 08:20 +0000, Canol Gokel wrote:


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Gwenael Casaccio <mrgwen <at> gmail.com> writes:

I want to release it with a license which allows the reuse of every part of the
book for whatever purpose (Is that "too" free? Actually I haven't thought that
much about it yet...) but I have no idea which license to use, I'll look at that
after finishing the book, I guess, but don't hesitate to make suggestions in the
mean time.

Don't hesitate to use any part of it in the distribution itself.

Though I want it to remain as a book than a tutorial. Because tutorials tend to
explain the overall concept quickly while this book tries to explain every
single detail on the learning curve of programming computers.

I'm currently working on Chapter 5 which is the last remaining part of the book.
After that, the first edition will be complete (hopefully) and I'll try to find
ways to make it more open to contributors to create the second edition which
will include advanced topics for advanced programmers (I have to open it because
I'm not an experienced programmer myself :)).



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With the completion of the Chapter 5, the final draft is ready. I also put some
blank pages for a better printing organisation. You can grab it, again, from:

http://www.canol.info/smalltalk/gnu_smalltalk_book.pdf

Now, I'll try to prepare a cover and choose a license, then release it to the
public.



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On 10/03/2009 01:41 PM, Canol Gokel wrote:
> With the completion of the Chapter 5, the final draft is ready. I also put some
> blank pages for a better printing organisation. You can grab it, again, from:
>
> http://www.canol.info/smalltalk/gnu_smalltalk_book.pdf

It's really professional. :-) Congratulations.

Paolo


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On 03.10.2009, at 15:41, Canol Gokel wrote:

Do you use the same offsets (larger on left, smaller on right) on all  
pages intentionally?
Wouldn't it make sense to leave larger offsets near spine?

just my 0.02€ :)



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Alexey Zakhlestin <indeyets <at> gmail.com> writes:

>
> Do you use the same offsets (larger on left, smaller on right) on all  
> pages intentionally?
> Wouldn't it make sense to leave larger offsets near spine?
>
> just my 0.02€ :)
>

Before doing the layout I looked at some technical books I have and see that it
is the case on most of them. But I don't know much about publishing and,
actually, I don't know whether this book will ever be printed as an actual book.
It is only about 120 pages, after all... I think most people will print it onto
A4 or something via their printers. If any need to publish it as an actual book
arises, I can do the necessary changes...




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