Smalltalk is a powerful system, and it takes time to learn it. People often say it takes six months to become useful in Smalltalk, and a couple of years to master it. I disagree. I can make people useful in Smalltalk in a quarter of that time if they work hard, and half that time if they only put in 40 hours a week. On the other hand, I don't think I ever stop learning, so why should you? In that sense, I never feel like I have mastered something.
One difference between the way I teach and the way other people teach is that I do not believe in short courses. A short course on Smalltalk only introduces you to it, it cannot make you useful in it. I think that a good course needs to be five or six weeks long. At the University of Illinois, my course is spread over fifteen weeks, but most people take two or three other courses at the same time. If you compressed this course, it would be about five weeks long.
One of the characteristics of my courses is that I teach by doing. I have a series of homeworks that get students ready for a project, and then the last half of the course is a group project. The project is proof that you are useful, and it also makes you useful.
When I teach the course in the fall of 1998, it will be videotaped. In the spring of 1999, and at yet unscheduled times thereafter, it will taught over the internet. It is part of the the CS department's new Internet Masters program. However, you don't have to be getting a degree to take the class.
The course uses VisualWorks Smalltalk, but people who have taken the course have gone off and become VisualAge consultants, so the dialect of Smalltalk is not that important. I suppose you could use VisualWorks for the homeworks and then use some other version for the project. The advantage of VisualWorks is that 1) I know it well and have lots of exercises for it, 2) there is a free version of it that is fine for classwork, and 3) there is a great book on it that we are going to use. Also, I think that its design is cleaner than that of VisualAge, though VisualAge certainly has just as many features, if not more. For learning, however, more is not necessarily better.
Contact Ralph Johnson at johnson@cs.uiuc.edu.