My first language was Fortran.

Oh your poor thing! There's your problem for sure.

The syntax mind bender is a prejudice you've formed over time.

You're used to seeing stuff like HashMapAdd(map,key,value);
Which is a really sucky syntax - even worse are the way javap prints out
the prototypes as

void java.util.HashMap.add(java.lang.Object,java.lang.Object) and you have
no idea which argument which.

Smalltalk puts arguments within the selectors (method names basically).

dictionary at: aKey put: anObject

the method name is at:put: or as more commonly written #at:put:

Anyhow, the David N Smith book is pretty good in general. The Ken Howard book Developers Guide to Visualworks is really good if you're using Visualworks. The Art and Science of Smalltalk (forget the author offhand) is also quite decent.