About

Welcome to Hacking the Valley

In creating this web site my goal is to promote the good parts of favorite language: PHP, Ruby, and Smalltalk. I want to show why PHP has earned its status as the most popular server scripting language, and I want to write about Ruby, a wonderfully fun—and powerful—language that currently powers Ruby on Rails.

Now, about Smalltalk… I have considerable experience with PHP and Ruby, but I am a Smalltalk beginner. I’ve been looking at Smalltalk for several years, but I’m always pulled back into PHP and Ruby because that seems to be where most of the paying jobs are. However, I can see that Smalltalk is exactly what I want to learn. I can see that it can resolve many problems that require enormous effort in PHP. Since Ruby was partly inspired by Smalltalk, and I like Ruby, I thought I might as well climb to the top of the mountain and just learn Smalltalk.

Besides being a programmer, I am teach in the Computer Science department at the City College of San Francisco. While teaching PHP, Perl, and Ruby to beginners and professionals for the last decade, I’ve seen the same learning issues arise in each new class of students. I take pride in having helped many of these students go on to successful careers in web development. I’ve created hundreds of documents, screencasts, and Keynote presentations along the way, and I’m going to share many of those  articles and lessons in these pages.

I hope you find this web site useful. I always appreciate feedback and criticism in my effort to improve my work. If you see something that is incorrect, mis-typed, nonsensical, or just plain wrong, please use the feedback form to let me know how I can improve this project.

Happy hacking…

Douglas Putnam