Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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that I can only marginally recommend- mostly because all of the other books that have been published on GTK+ are either out of date or out of print, so this book seems to be the winner by default.

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.

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

I have had this book for a couple years now and I still reference it all the time! There is nothing about this book that I do not like. Initially it helped me to get started and filled in all the blanks that I had from the online docs. But then as I learned more I kept going back to learn about the widgets that are basically not documented anywhere else.

I was surprised to see some of the low reviews as it doesn't make any sense to me. I never hesitate to recommend this book. If you want to learn GTK+ development get this book! You will not be disappointed.

Other things:
I agree with the reviewer that said a discussion on how to manage memory would have been helpful. Luckily it is documented well on the gtk+ forums. Just google for "Gtk memory management in a nutshell". Hopefully this will be in the next book.

The other book I would highly recommend is "Autotools: A Practioner's Guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool.". One of the things that people struggle with is compiling a GTK+ application with the autotools. I think most people just grab scripts from another project and tweak it until things work, but without really knowing what they are doing. The Autotools book will teach you everything you need to know to compile your GTK+ application.

Most programming books are written to be references, used in a class or for a challenge in resisting the forces of gravity on the eyelids. This book is impressive and refreshing. It becomes obvious to the reader that the author not only has extensive knowledge of the material, but is very proficient at presenting it in a way that facilitates learning for both novice and experienced programmers alike. He does so in a manner that doesn't alienate or annoy one for the progress of the other.

Some books may leave you frustrated or discouraged by not addressing concepts or questions that seem obvious. The author has anticipated these issues and doesn't leave you hanging. The book is linked to a web site which serves as a resource guide and supplement to material in the book. The website, like the book, is well organized and focused on providing the reader with the material she/he needs to become a proficient gtk+ developer. It contains many items of interest such as source code for examples & exercises, programming articles, API documentation and links to online resources. You can view the full Table of Contents there at [...] The author is also available by email. His replies were prompt and helpful.

In the book, there are in-depth reference appendices on properties, signals, styles, stock items, GError types and exercise solutions with hints. It covers just about everything you need to know to get a solid grip on GTK+ development including an entire chapter devoted to using GLib, dynamic user interfaces and creating custom widgets. It is obvious the author has given meticulous thought in the creation of this book. Every chapter contains a plethora of simple to advanced executable examples along with exercises designed to make you think and solidify what you've learned. The examples are "real world" programming examples that you will actually use.

I highly recommend this book and look forward to future works from this author.

This book is very well organized and very well written. It is true to its title, "Foundations" of GTK+ development. It gives just enough material to get started on GTK+ programming, and just enough material to plod through the official API. Thanks to this book, I'm working on my own file manager that will hopefully replace all of the half-baked file managers available for Gnome. Well done, Andrew Krause and Apress!

(P.S., for the next edition, include a solid explanation about memory management: sink, release, memory leaks, etc.)

This book is always available online free of charge but I like to have a paper copy.

It has a great mix with theory, examples, etc and is great for "learning by doing".

I had this book for some time, and I like it very much. It is great both as a reference (but there you could use Internet instead) and as a study material.

A textview widget in python had me stumped, but no longer. Anyone wishing to tackle GTK+ programming should buy this well organized and excellent book. It is well worth it.

Andrew Krause has pulled together a wide collection of information on GTK2 and arranged it in an easy to understand format. This book is a handy reference for experienced GTK+ developers like myself and maybe the BEST introductory/beginners book available. It contains the information and explanations you are looking for when building a gtk application using existing widgets, and the details you need when writing your own widgets or extending existing widgets. I recommend this book to all comers, and consider it an essential addition to my Linux library.

James Scott, Jr.
(a.k.a. Skoona)

I picked up this book to help me develop an application knowing absolutely nothing about GTK+ programming and it was beyond helpful. Excellently written, not to mention many code examples showing how to use the GTK+ library properly and efficiently. This book gives you the tools and the understanding for building your own applications and not just re-creating the examples given to you.
I highly recommend this book to anyone programing in C and want to learn how to use the GTK+ library along with the GLib and Pango libraries. This is one book I'm not going to let go of.