Programming Smalltalk is particularly suited for readers with no prior programming...

The goal of this book is to explain elementary programming concepts such as loops, abstractions, composition, and conditionals to novices of all ages. It teaches the core programming concepts based on simple problems, involving the manipulation of robots or "turtles" as frequently seen in school learning environments. The ideal reader...

Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a brand-new companion volume to Apress’s highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words “at work” suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his...

Ruby inherits characteristics from various languages—Lisp, Smalltalk, C, and Perl, to name a few. Metaprogramming comes from Lisp (and Smalltalk). It’s a bit like magic, which makes something astonishing possible. There are two kinds of magic: white magic, which does good things, and black magic, which can do nasty things. Likewise,...

Testing has always been a part of software development. For decades, comprehensive testing was defined by complex manual test procedures backed by big budgets; but something revolutionary happened in 1998. In his Guide to Better Smalltalk, Smalltalk guru Kent Beck introduced an automated test framework called SUnit. This triggered an...

Software testing is indispensable and is one of the most discussed topics in software development today. Many companies address this issue by assigning a dedicated software testing phase towards the end of their development cycle. However, quality cannot be tested into a buggy application. Early and continuous unit testing has been shown to be...