also known as "the Blue Book" due to its blue cover image.
Written by Adele Goldberg and David Robson, this is the definitive
reference for the smalltalk language - a must in every library.
ISBN 0-201-11371-6 Addison Wesley
also known as "the Purple Book".
A new edition of [1] with some updates but also omissions (implementations,
as the title suggests).
ISBN ISBN 0-201-13688-0 Addison Wesley
We recommend, having eiher the blue or purple book at hand.
[3]
Smalltalk-80, the interactive programming envronment
written by Adele Goldberg, also known as "the Orange Book".
Describes the user interface as in the original Xerox smalltalk implementation.
Not up-to-date, but basic concepts of the programming environment
are still as described in this book.
ISBN 0-201-11372-4 Addison Wesley
also known as "the Green Book".
Some nice-to-read background information on the history and internals of
early smalltalk implementations.
Not up-to-date, many new research results make some of the articles obsolete.
ISBN 0-201-11669-3 Addison Wesley
[5]
The design and evaluation of a high performance smalltalk system
written by David Michael Unger, this book describes many techniques
which are also used in Smalltalk/X (and other modern smalltalk
implementations).
Particularly, the description of generation scavenging garbage collection,
inline caching and lazy evaluation of contexts are valuable.
This is not a book to learn smalltalk, but a good resource
for implementation details.
ISBN 0-262-21010-X Mit Press
[6]
X3J20 Ansi Smalltalk Language Standard proposal
a not yet finished standard (at the time this list was conducted),
which will describe a common language subset
to be implemented (hopefully) by all smalltalk implementations.
Dont put too much weight on that standard - most of it is a defacto-standard
anyway. The troublemakers when porting applications (graphics interfacing)
are not even touched in it.
written by Wilf R. LaLonde & John R. Pugh.
although being outdated somewhat (since it describes an old version of Smalltalk-80),
this book is still a good reference on the smalltalk language and class library.
Especially, the basic classes (collections, streams, numeric classes etc.)
are described in much detail.
ISBN 0-13-465964-3 Prentice Hall
[8]
Smalltalk - An introduction to Application Development using Visualworks
written by Trevor Hopkins & Bernard Horan.
a good introduction to the smalltalk language and basic classes.
Less detailed in the graphics and windowing area
(will there be a part2 of this book ?).
Recommended - most of it is also valid for Smalltalk/X.
ISBN 0-13-318387-4 Prentice Hall