The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide [Paperback]

Matthias Warkus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2004

Developers who write programs for GNOME use the GNOME API. Working with the GNOME API is preferable because the program will conform to the standard GNOME program look and feel. It also allows the developer to use the GNOME specific libraries in the program, greatly simplifying the development process. The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide is the official GNOME Foundation guide to programming GUIs and applications using the GTK+ and GNOME API. Developed in partnership with the GNOME Foundation, this book is for programmers working with the GNOME 2 desktop environment. Each section begins with an example program that serves as a tutorial, then develops into a reference on the topic. Includes abundant, well-annotated examples. Knowledge of the C programming language is required, but no GUI programming experience is necessary.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"an information-dense text that is particularly well-written; extensive use is made of annotated examples" -- Linux Users of Victoria

About the Author

Matthias Warkus has been using Linux since the age of sixteen. He has worked with the GNOME Foundation to produce the German localization of GNOME, published articles and lectured on GNOME, and spent considerable time working on the GNOME source code.

Product Details

• Paperback: 520 pages
• Publisher: No Starch Press; 1st edition (February 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593270305
• ISBN-13: 978-1593270308
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,003,236 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent intro, May 16, 2004

By 

Anthony Lawrence "Unix, Linux and Mac OS X" (Middleboro, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide (Paperback)

I'm more of a command line kind of guy, but there are things better done in a graphical treatment. When this is true, I often resort to HTML, but that isn't always suitable either. Most of what I've read about GUI programming has left me feeling daunted by the learning curve, and the writing itself has mostly been difficult to read and unsatisfying

This book was a delightful exception. As its introduction promises, the content "lies somewhere between a tutorial and a reference". The code examples are often just the kind of things you would write yourself to test-drive your understanding; no unnecessary fluff. There are complete programs also, and these are downloadable from the No Starch web site.

Matthias Warkus has a real knack for explaining complex subjects. I particularly liked his way of explaining object inheritance, which is completely upside down from the way it is usually presented, and thereby makes a much more understandable case for using OO code.

The first chapter is an overview of GLib capabilies. I was quite surprised at the things GLib includes: I come from the days when you needed to buy commercial libraries to get features like memory management, linked lists, B-trees, etc. The second chapter covers GObject, which adds Object Oriented capability to standard C programming. That's an important aspect of Gnome: it is plain vanilla C with the OO stuff added on through the GObject library. For those of us who have yet to be entranced by C++, that's important.

Chapters three and four explain GTK+ and the Gnome libraries, the overlap between them, and hen you'd use either. Chapter five is a lucid introduction to Glade, the interactive development tool for Gnome. I was interested to note that Glade produces XML files that your programs references through calls to Glade libraries.

The rest of the book is miscellaneous coverage that wasn't covered elsewhere; compiling issues, configuration helpers like Gconf. I had ben previously unaware of the GnomeVFS discussed in chapter eight which allows your program to transparently access remote web servers and archive formats like PKzipped files.

All in all, this looks like a very good intro to Gnome GUI development.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Does What It Sets Out To Do, March 23, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide (Paperback)

This is a pretty heavy duty programming book. The opening words say you should have, "Firm Programming Experience in C, including pointers, dynamically allocated data structures, and pointers to functions, C macros and the C preprocessor, fundamental understanding of Unix: processes, libraries, search paths, and so on."

Then the first chapter is on GLIB, a description of the more popular of the routines included in the library. The second chapter, GOBJECT has an opening note: "This chapter is dry and dense." -- Still, this chapter is one of the best descriptions of object oriented programming that I've ever read.

Finally in chapter 3 you begin to get into the heart of the matter. GTK+ is the toolkit for programming the GUI. Chapter 4 is on the GNOME Libraries. These two chapters are really the heart of the book and runs for about forty percent of the entire book. After that there is just some odds and ends that are left over.

This book, as clearly and succinctly as possible does what it sets out to do. It's not the simplest book on the shelf, but then again, neither is its subject.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A must have for GTK+/Gnome developers!, May 3, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide (Paperback)

I got this book about a week ago, have managed to read about 1/4, and all I can say is that it's GREAT! My priority is in GTK+ development and not in Gnome, but fortunately this book is not only for Gnome hackers. Chapters 1-3 give good information about GLib, GObject and GTK+, can't wait to read the Glade chapter!

One small minus is that page numbers in Index are unaccurate, showing two pages bigger value where the content can actually be found.. Not a big problem, with this book and API documentation GTK+/Gnome development becomes much easier than before!!