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How to Read BookMorphs
BookMorphs are the digital book and slide presentation format of Squeak. Here's a quickie description of how to use them:
- Download the zip file containing the book (e.g., ch1-history.zip) and uncompress it. You'll probably need Winzip on Windows, Stuffit-Expander on a Mac, and unzip on UNIX.
- Download Squeak and start it running. (See Squeak FAQ)
- Click on the background in Squeak to open the World/Desktop menu, choose Open, then FileList.
- Find the book file, e.g., ends in .bo
- Use the yellow-button menu to choose "Open as book"
- If you read the book from MVC, the window may open too small to read the whole book. Drag the lower-right hand corner to make it larger.
BookMorphs are serialized forms of all the objects in the books. "Serialized" means that the objects have been rendered in a format that can be stored to a file and later recreated in memory with all of its connections and relationships intact. Serialization is a hard problem, e.g., what do you do when the definition of an object (i.e., its class) has changed between serialization and re-instantiation? BookMorphs do handle this with conversion methods.
One day, you'll read in a BookMorph, and it will tell you that an object has changed, and it will ask you to please either find or write a conversion method. Here's the easiest thing to do: Choose to write one. The BookMorph will provide you with a template that is almost always correct as-is. Just close the browser that pops up, and try to read the book again. It'll most probably work the second time.
But how do you create a .bo file?
- yeah. I can't figure out how to export a bookmorph. whenever I try to save pages to server, I get an error complaining about ServerDirectory. I can't figure out how to specify a path where to save the bookmorph and its pages on my hard drive.
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