Customer Reviews

Beginning GTK+ and GNOME

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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This book is well written and on a whole well executed. The two sample projects that he walks you through I thought were excellent additions to the book. The author also gives you a brief background of the GNOME project and how it is different from KDE which uses QT.

One thing I did not like about this book was the fact he does not give any mention to GTK-- which is the C++ kit or any of the many other languages that can take advantage of GTK beyond acknowledging it's existance. It would have been really nice for this book to have had a chapter on other languages and GTK.

Also the chapter on the rapid application development (AKA RAD) tool GLADE was rather skimpy.

However if you are a C programmer looking for a good GTK book, look no further.

This book is very easy to read thanks mainly to the author but also to a nice font and layout. The examples are very helpful and cover a broad range of areas within GTK and GNOME programming. Bottom line would be the quality of writing and the diverse coverage. I have 5 GTK/GNOME books, and I like this one the best.

From the beginning you get a strong sense of being directly in touch with the subject. The authors ideas and his writing style are easy to understand and make for interesting reading if you want to know more about GNOME programming methods. The welcome at the front of the book says it all and it gives a clear explanation of any introductory topics that may be helpful before progressing into the later chapters. Even the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman are mentioned in order to help you to understand some basic ideas. The rest of the book goes into some detail about libraries, widgets and other parts of the sophisticated programming language that GNOME really is. Chapter two starts out with thirty pages of introduction to Glib. All of the introductory subjects that you won't see anywhere else are here and can be easily understood. Next is introducing GTK+. This is enormously useful and gives some simple ideas about code and how to use it properly. The next part of the book goes into the subject of controlling the user interface layout. It was at about this point that I was beginning to think something like "I wonder why you can't get visual basic books that are as good as this ?" Also, "It would have cost me thousands of dollars to have done this with MS Windows programming tools". I thought that the last two chapters which are about gIDE and Glade were the best part of the book. There's also the advantage of being able to subscribe to a GNOME internet list to ask the sort of questions that you wouldn't have been able to ask before you read the book. If you haven't done much with GTK+ then do go ahead and buy this book. Your world will change!

I like Peter Wright's style of writing for this book. Other big books like this can be boring to read, which can really slow down the learning process in my experience. Wright speaks to the reader in a language that is suitable for beginners. Some C knowledge is expected, but is marginal really. I liked the introduction to glade, as well as the two big examples in the final two chapters. One thing that would have been kind of nice is more material on automake and autoconf. Otherwise I enjoyed this book a lot because he keeps things very simple.