Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)
by Andrew Krause

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Book Summary Information

Author: Andrew Krause
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-04-23
ISBN: 1590597931
Number of pages: 630
Publisher: Apress
Accessories:

Book Reviews of Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

Book Review: marginal thumbs up
Summary: 3 Stars

I wanted to like this book, but unfortunately I cannot in good conscience give it 5 stars as the other reviewers have.

I will say the book is well organized and is definitely useful as a starting point for studying GTK+ and the author clearly has a great deal of knowledge about the subject. But what should have been the main strength of the book that differentiates it from the mostly inadequate online tutorials is the author conveying to the reader straightforward explanations of important concepts and insider tips and tricks that can only come from extensive experience. He tries to do this, but I found many of his explanations ambiguous and confusing. Important terminology was left undefined or poorly defined which contributed to the confusion.

The author dutifully plods through a presentation of most of the main widgets, providing essentially the same trivial example code each time with minor variations- basically just showing how to put the widget onscreen. But there was a frustrating lack of material devoted to how to use signals and events to perform any useful tasks. The vast majority of the functionality of any GUI application lies in its event handlers and callback functions. After reading this book, you will be able to prototype the GUI for your application, but you may be at a loss to make it actually do something.

By Ch.3 and 4, the same example code has been replicated so many times that there is an increasing frequency of copy-paste errors that gradually becomes very annoying. Also, there are many typos in the text. The lack of editorial oversight and technical review on the part of the publisher combined with the author's lack of attention to detail and failures in exposition has created a book that I can only marginally recommend- mostly because all of the other books that have been published on GTK+ are either out of date or out of print, so this book seems to be the winner by default.

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Summary of Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

GTK+ is one of the most influential graphical toolkits for the Linux operating system. It is the technology upon which the GNOME and XFCE desktop environments are based, and its crucial to have clear understanding of its complexities to build even a simple Linux desktop application. Foundations of GTK+ Development guides you through these complexities, laying the foundation that will allow you to cross from novice to professional.

Foundations of GTK+ Development is aimed at C programmers and presents numerous real-life examples that you can immediately put to use in your projects. Some familiarity with C programming is assumed, as the book delves into new topics from the beginning. Topics like object inheritance are covered early on to allow for complete understanding of code examples later. And the provided examples are real-life situations that can help you get a head start on your own applications.

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