This is what I provided the JRMPC participants: https://jrmpc.ca/ (see "How to learn Smalltalk programming"). I'm not sure how I could've done better, though.
You make an excellent point about duplication and keeping documentation up-to-date. However, there has to be some middle ground that makes it easier and more convenient for new developers to find the tools they need. Perhaps a synoptical reference showing the more common classes used, such as collections, web-related classes, time-related classes, exception and error classes, file system-related classes, process-related classes, and so on. These classes ought not to change much, if at all. Tim Mackinnon wrote > Or we teach people to fish…? What’s the point of duplicating everything > that’s already in the image anyway - we just need to be cleverer or ensure > that people know to look there and have the right onboarding experience to > do that? Otherwise its just another thing that gets out of date very > rapidly and we already have enough problems with that. > > I’d be interested in what intro material Richard gave the students to > start with (after all - he has quite a few tutorials of his own, some of > which I had followed - but I suspect they are out of date now themselves). > When you launch pharo there is the helpful welcome screen - did the > student’s actually use it and follow what it says? > > And did we see any of them in this forum (or was that against the rules?) > > Tim > >> On 24 Mar 2020, at 17:28, Ben Coman < > btc@ > > wrote: >> >> Pharo has some good documentation, but its more lesson-based than a >> library reference. >> Those of us familiar with Pharo know the tricks to use the system itself >> as that reference, but I'd imagine this is an unfamiliar workflow for >> newcomers. >> >> I have seen before a class library reference generated from the image, >> but I couldn't put my hands on it right now. >> @all, is it still being generated?. This might provide newcomers >> something more familiar to work with. >> >> cheers -ben >> >> On Tue, 24 Mar 2020 at 03:00, Richard Kenneth Eng < > horrido.hobbies@ > <mailto: > horrido.hobbies@ > >> wrote: >> https://jrmpc.ca/2020/03/20/what-makes-learning-smalltalk-challenging/ >> <https://jrmpc.ca/2020/03/20/what-makes-learning-smalltalk-challenging/> >> >> >> FWIW, 95% of respondents pointed to the lack of reference documentation >> for the class library as the major obstacle to learning Smalltalk/Pharo. >> >> Richard -- Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html
