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

Andrew Krause (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590597931 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597934 | Publication Date: April 25, 2007 | Edition: 1st ed. 2007. Corr. 2nd printing

There are only two mainstream solutions for building the graphical interface of Linux-based desktop applications, and GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) is one of them. As the standard for the GNOME and XFCE desktop environments, it is a necessary technology for all Linux programmers.

Foundations of GTK+ Development guides the reader through the complexities of GTK+, laying the groundwork that allows the reader to make the leap from novice to professional. Beginning with an overview of key topics such as widget choice, placement, and behavior, readers move on to learn about advanced issues such as custom widget creation. Replete with real-world examples, the developer can quickly take advantages of the concepts presented within to begin building his own projects.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrew Krause is the creator of OpenLDev, an integrated development environment that focuses on C, C++, Gtk+ and Gtkmm project management. He is currently attending Pennsylvania State University with a major in Computer Engineering.

Andrew has eight years of experience with many computer and web programming languages such as C, C++, Perl, PHP and others. He also designs flight hardware for the Low Ionosphere Measurement Satellite project at Penn State.

Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. 2007. Corr. 2nd printing edition (April 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597931
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597934
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #234,336 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrew Krause is the creator of OpenLDev, an integrated development environment that focuses on C, C++ and GTK+ projects. He is currently attending Pennsylvania State University with a major in Computer Engineering. Andrew has been developing with many computer and web programming languages since 1998 including C, C++, Perl, PHP as well as the graphical design libraries GTK+, Gtkmm and Qt. For more information, visit AndrewKrause.net.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars marginal thumbs up, June 9, 2008

By 

rudeWookie (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

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.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good but could be even better, October 19, 2008

By 

xProgrammer (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

I may be the first person to rate this book less than five stars. And please don't get me wrong this is a good book in the sense that it is right up to date and the examples are very helpful. There are, in my opinion, two main areas where the book could have been improved. It dives off into a discussion of some very interesting applications of GLib including socket programming which the author says must of needs be incomplete. This doesn't really fit in with the main thrust of the book and probably should have been the basis, in an expanded form, for a separate book. This space could well have been used for a more expanded treatment of the issues at hand. Secondly the author's views on user interface design have overly influenced his treatment of GtkFixed, GtkLayout etc. One suspects that his work as a developer has been primarily in producing tools for anyone anywhere rather than applications for corporations and / or small businesses. However, regardless of the above, armed with this book plus the API documentation will get you going much faster and more efficiently than if you have only the API documentation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Useful Book, December 1, 2011

By 

gtk_developer - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Foundations of GTK+ Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source) (Paperback)

I use the book as a reference. I found the book to be very useful. The section on creating widgets was particularly useful.