I found it easy to understand and I knew nothing about small talk (examples were in smalltalk).

I found it helpful - it allowed me to think and talk about structures in more explicit way, so problem solving got easier.

I think it should be read when you already have some experience with project that has some logic in it (e.g. not crud and also not frontend - frontend requires entirely different structures imo) where you had to make decisions about what goes where. It cease to be abstract then (or your brain adjusted to thinking in more structural way).