Goals of this book

The primary goals of this book are to teach you how to program in Dylan, and how to write programs in an object-oriented style. Along the way, we hope to convince you to use Dylan. It is intended to be a practical, elegant, and fun language to use. This book is a tutorial on programming in Dylan, and it does the following:

• Begins with the most basic use of Dylan, and gradually expands to show the more powerful and advanced techniques.

• Gives the flavor of working with the Dylan language in a typical Dylan environment.

• Shows how to define classes and methods that work together to solve a problem.

• Shows how to use many of Dylan's classes, functions, and features to good effect within the context of an example application.

• Introduces the more advanced features of Dylan, including multiple inheritance, performance, exceptions, and macros.

This book does not attempt to be as complete as The Dylan Reference Manual, and does not provide the following kinds of material:

• Complete descriptions of all classes and functions provided by Dylan

• Complete descriptions of the detailed mechanisms in Dylan

To make full use of Dylan, programmers need The Dylan Reference Manual, as well as this book.