Customer Reviews

Portable Gui Development With C++

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Watson's book which purports to put forth a cross-platform foundation class for MS Windows, Macintosh, and XWindows succeeds only in confounding the reader. First, the book completely skirts all important portability issues. It does not address keyboard input, binary data compatability, character codesets or anything else. The best example is perhaps the chapter on File I/O, which is all of THREE pages long (80% of which is source code).

There is nothing which describes the philosophy and design of his class libraries as a whole. Instead, what you get are a single short chapter on the most rudimentary aspects of each of the three windowing environments supported.

Perhaps the most rude shock of all is that the 100+ pages of source code literally dumped into the book are NOT included on a diskette or CD-ROM. No, instead you are expected to mail order a diskette from the author for the huge markup of $12, presumably to spare you hours of retyping the code. This is 1997 folks, how about an FTP site?

Adding insult to injury is the condition that the code is NOT in fact freeware and you may not redistribute source code to programs written using it or suffer the threat of unspecified implied legal action.

Thank heavens the title of this book doesn't include the catchphrase "Object-Oriented", because its not. There isn't even anything as descriptive as a class hierarchy. That's because the classes have no relationships.

Your time would be better spent downloading any of the wonderful cross-platform GUI frameworks which are FREELY available on the Internet such as YACL or vxWindows.

Full of errors, buggy code, poor object design, and a real lack of study make this one of the most hated books in my library. Mark Watson and his publisher should be ashamed.