Book Review: Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

This is my short review for the book Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. You can check the notes I took at Clippings from Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns - dsdshome.

To me (a Ruby/Elixir developer), this book reads more like a guide about how to write cleaner code (like Clean Code by Robert Cecil Martin).

But it's not a magic book like DHH promoted1.

I think the best way to use this book2 is to:

  1. Do a quick Inspectional Reading to know these patterns exist and when you need to use them.
  2. Write your code as usual.
  3. Check the specific pattern when you need to use it.

These books are like dictionaries, you can't just read them, you need to reference it when you are practicing. And only in this way, you can understand these patterns better.

Footnotes:

1

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns was listed The five programming books that meant most to me (DHH) – Signal v. Noise

2

And other reference books like this, e.g. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code