Visual Works is a dialect of Smalltalk Language sold by Cincom as part of Cincom Smalltalk.
It started in Xerox Parc back in the '70s and was first released as Smalltalk-80. A startup was spun out of Xerox called Parc Place to commercialize Smalltalk, and they called their product Objectworks, then renaming it to Visual Works in 1994. Parc Place changed its name a few times (Parc Place-Digitalk, Object Share), and then sold it's Smalltalk business including Visual Works to Cincom.
You can download Visual Works Non Commercial for free.
If you are learning Smalltalk with Visual Works, Ralph Johnson recommends
Smalltalk: An Introduction to Application Development Using Visual Works by Trevor Hopkins and Bernard Horan [ISBN 0133183874].
There are a wide range of free books available for Smalltalk thanks to the efforts of Stephane Ducasse.
See other Smalltalk Implementations.
The newsgroup is news:comp.lang.smalltalk
The home page for Visual Works is www.cincomsmalltalk.com 
There is a number of blogs at www.cincomsmalltalk.com . The blog is Visual Works powered.
In addition planet.smalltalk.org aggregates most Smalltalk blogs.
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As stated near the bottom, VW 7 and up have the Refactoring Browser as the core browser.
Ralph Johnson says at wiki.cs.uiuc.edu
I prefer 3.0 to 5i because the browsers work better. The 5i browser had to be completely redone and still has some problems. Moreover, the Refactoring Browser doesn't work yet for 5i. 5i has a lot of neat features, but I get the feeling that it is still beta software when I use it.
[re: VWNC5i] Does anyone else find the namespaces unintuitive? I spent 20 minutes today trying to find a class I had just added. I couldn't take it. Now I'm looking at Squeak. -- Sunir Shah
Just switch to 3.0. And download the Refactoring Browser. All will be well. --Anthony Lander
Um, did you try "Find...". Finds any class in any namespace quite nicely. For that matter, use "Browse All Classes" and get a list by category irrespective of namespace. -- Alan Knight
Joy Of Smalltalk is a Visual Works-based textbook available online from the Visual Works wiki.
Refactoring Browser works good with Visual Works 7.0, which also has non-commercial version. The whole environment was also improved and now looks better. Connectivity tools in Visual Works 7.0 shine. Notable addition is full support of Web Services. Open Talk framework seems very promising to me -- Pavel Perikov
Visual Works 7.2 is out has preview of Pollock - the new GUI framework (currently beta3), GLORP - Generic Lightweight Object Relational Persistence, .NET Connect etc. Many minor tools improvements.
Visual Works 7.1 is out
Note: Visual Works 7.1 is out now... NC CDs and all. It's very nice.. several big & small improvements. -- Dave Astels
"Now on Visual Works 7.6 with 7.7 due Oct/Nov 09"
Are there any quickstart guides to VW? I'm playing with Open Talk at the moment and there is a total of ONE useful example on the whole bloody damned web about it. The only guide I found was for 5i and starts by telling you to click on the Open Talk Launcher, which doesn't exist as far as I can tell. And the PDF only works as an intro to the subject in general and reference, not a guide per se. This is endemic to all serious frameworks and tools near as I can tell. (Oh, and I know Cincom's planning to make quickstart guides but I'm not long on patience.) -- RK
See original on c2.com