The Cuis Book

This free book is a gentle introduction to programming with Cuis-Smalltalk. The reader without prior-knowledge to programming will learn about object oriented programming, the Smalltalk environment and its language.

The book comes with a recurring theme : writing a free inspired replica of the first video-game ever created: Spacewar!

 

In 10 chapters, the reader will learn all the major concepts of object oriented programming. It introduces the concepts of message, object and class. The following chapters present the most useful classes for programming : collection iterators, control flow, Morph, event. Then the book concludes with chapters to learn how to manage code, to debug and good practice to share code.

• The Message Way of Life
• Class - Model of Communicating Entities
• The Collection Way of Life
• Control Flow Messaging
• Visual with Morph
• The Fundamentals of Morph
• Events
• Code Management
• Debug and Exception Handling
• Sharing Cuis

All along the book, the reader learns with examples. Exercises are proposed to reinvest the freshly learnt concepts. An appendix is dedicated to the solutions of the exercises:

 Solution in the appendix:

At the end of each chapter, there is a section dedicated to the development of the Spacewar! game. Of course, its contents is related to what was learnt in the previous sections of the chapter. For example in the chapter introducing classes, the objects involved in the game design are introduced with their attributes:

For the impatient, the book repository contains the game package ready to install and to hack in Cuis-Smalltalk.

Happy Programming!