Even though Pharo has evolved a lot from the original smalltalk, the main ideas remain the same. And nowadays the most active development is done by the pharo team. They not only build the software but also tons of high quality content.
I recommend starting with the Pharo Mooc. [1] And then deep dive on their books [2].
From there you can read old classic smalltalk books, such as Kent Back's "Smalltalk Best Practices" and Chamond Liu'a
"Smalltalk, Object and Design".
and of course, joining our discord server (invite at: http://pharo.org/community) is the best way to get help and guidance in fast way, we have several channel dedicated to help newbies :)
Smalltalk people often hate on it, but I found gnu_smalltalk useful simply because I didn't have to navigate around entirely new tooling to play around with Smalltalk. And I played around with the Koans, https://github.com/sl4m/gnu_smalltalk_koans
For what it is worth, a lot of Smalltalk is captured by Ruby. Like the ability to add methods to integers.
I tried GNU-Smalltalk before Pharo. The only issue for me was that I couldn't get its class browser working under any of the Debian-based linux distros I tried.
Ive not looked at it in a long time - but one of the reasons for learning smalltalk was that everything is an object which made it a great language to learn OO
For learning, traditional smalltalk environments (with a gui browser) are vastly superior. Everything is live, so the learner can witness the immediate propagation of changes made and follow them through as deep as desired through the debugger.
I tried Squeak a few years ago (on a Mac). It was remarkably painless to get going, instant really. Suddenly you are in a different world.. Highly recommended.
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From there you can read old classic smalltalk books, such as Kent Back's "Smalltalk Best Practices" and Chamond Liu'a "Smalltalk, Object and Design".
[1] https://mooc.pharo.org [2] https://books.pharo.org
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....
For what it is worth, a lot of Smalltalk is captured by Ruby. Like the ability to add methods to integers.
It was ok because I wasn’t trying to use it in anger. Just very simple stuff where looking at the source was good enough.
Lots of objects there as well and it's super practical.
Not sure about Smalltalk besides amusing friends during a beer
https://squeak.org/