The language and IDE are so simple that it takes very little effort to learn, at least, in my experience. But you're right about the class library. However, is this really any different for any OOP language that has a rich class library? Or any language that has a rich API (<cough> Java <cough> C# <cough>)?

Smalltalk documentation isn't that bad. Here's a very, very gentle tutorial: http://amber-lang.net/learn.html

Here's a great (free!) book: http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/ByExample/

And a great (free!) book for GNU Smalltalk: http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/Gnu/ProgrammingUsi...

And a great set of instructional videos from the late James Robertson: http://www.jarober.com/blog/st4u.ssp

And a great Pharo blog: https://medium.com/concerning-pharo

And, of course, you may ask questions at StackOverflow and the Pharo user forum: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html