Best way to learn Smalltalk?

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".

[1] https://mooc.pharo.org [2] https://books.pharo.org

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 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.

https://squeak.org/

What are some benefits of learning small talk