I was interested in learning Smalltalk and downloaded Squeak a few months ago, but I couldn't really find any up-to-date resources on how to learn my way around the environment and stuff. Am I missing something?
I've tried those books and found the examples were out of date and it was very hard to learn from. I own > 25 programming books and this was one of the only ones that didn't click.
It's not Squeak/Pharo specific and it is about ten years old but I find "the art and science of smalltalk" one of the best (although it also covers a lot of OO basics)
Some of the cool kids at Smalltalk High forked Squeak to create Pharo back in 2008 and that's where a lot of the recent developer energy has gone. But rapid development has its costs: Pharo 5.0 has just come out while the site offers the "latest" Pharo by Example [1] with a 2009 copyright date. It also offers a link to a Pharo 1.x image you can download so the programming environment and book text will match up. (In fairness, there is also an online group effort to update the text to match the 5.0 release [2], but how successful that is you'll have to judge for yourself.)
I'm slightly biased toward the original Squeak group, but there the situation is at least as bad. Even though Squeak 5.1 is the most recent software, the Squeak by Example book (same author) is another case where you're best served by downloading an older version that matches the book.
That said, using a book with an older version isn't a bad choice. I used to have several wine bottles on my linux box for different vintages of Squeak. Among other things, this allowed me to immediately contrast two Squeak environments to see what, if anything, had changed in the last few years for a particular aspect of the systems.
Personally, I'd suggest people first start by pretending it's five years ago and trying the Squeak by Example [3] book and corresponding Squeak image. Once you understand the basics of that material, load the latest Squeak and start exploring. You'll be able to find the occasional enlightening video on specific Smalltalk topics by searching YouTube for Lawson English and jarober videos, but I'd strongly suggest the old school approach of skimming/reading the material of the Squeak Beginner's mailing list [4] and subscribing to it. I still get the digests in my mailbox and it was interesting to read the progress over the last few months of one beginner's project to manipulate imported spreadsheet information. Some of the answers provided clues to environment resources that even some of the pros had forgotten about.
I've been interested in Smalltalk, but I haven't read much about it other than the GNU Smalltalk man page and a "Squeak by Example" book[0].
The problem I'm having is that it's difficult to discern which "flavor" of Smalltalk I should dig into. Smalltalk-80? GNU? Squeak? Pharro? Which of these, if any, are still being developed?
As I mentioned in another reply here, I'd suggest you ignore the siren call of "most recent" and just pretend it's five years ago. Use the Squeak by Example book with it's associated version of Squeak to get a basic understanding of the environment and the object system's resources.
If you prefer, there's nothing wrong with trying Pharo or one of the commercial Smalltalks available with free, non-commercial licenses. Indeed, the only variety I'd warn against is GNU Smalltalk, which treats Smalltalk as just another file-oriented member of the GNU toolchain. That approach totally misses what made Smalltalk so revolutionary for its time: a rich environment for interacting with and exploring an object system.
