Customer Reviews

Programming with Qt (2nd Edition)

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

 

 

I hesitated to buy this after reading the negative reviews here. I am glad I did. It is exactly what I needed. It touches on the necessary basics of C++, event driven programming and covers how to download and install the Qt environment in the first chapter. The second is Hello World, the next few are guided tours of the major widgets, then some 20+ more chapters cover Qt by topic because it is much more than a GUI toolkit. The style is succinct yet easy to absorb. It took me about two days to read through it carefully. In that brief time now I just use the online Qt help for detail info.

I am new to Linux programming (I'm a .Net developer) and was a bit frustrated with the online tutorials for Qt and decided to give this book a try. I am very happy with the decision, this book is very well written. I like the style of the author, giving us some practical exercises after each topic, so we can improve the application he develops throughout the book (a "paintbrush"). Now that I understood the basics I can use the Qt documentation to do my own apps.

People who like those huge, "step-by-step" ("click File->Quit to exit the application...") books might be a bit disappointed with this one though, the author assumes that the reader knows some C++ and can figure out some stuff by himself/herself, so be warned. Not that he skips any information needed, but he doesn't repeat the same thing 10x either, so you gotta be a bit "smart" to read this book.

I find this book is very good. It provides quick help while programming, gives a lot of ideas how to solve problems, and a quick overview how the most common problems have to be dealt with.
But - yes, there is a 'but' - it is definitively not a book about GUI programming, it's about QT! If you are familiar with GUI development, such as java/swing programming or similar, and you are also familiar with C++, this book can be a great help for development.

One reviewer slams this book because it just rehashes the freely available help files and tutorials. That is not a fair assesment as Matthias does a good job of explaining what he is doing and how. The "free" help pages are pretty terse in this regard.

I can't give it 5 stars however because it doesn't take the time to talk about *how* to get your programs to compile in various environments (I use FreeBSD) and that can leave the reader very unsatisfied. There is enough on-line documentation to figure it out, but some pointers in this book would have really enhanced the experience.

Of course, if you aer using the KDE desktop this book is essential. This combined with the book on KDE is a good set for anyone who wants to develop applications for Linux (or FreeBSD).

Book starts out strong, and was helpful as an introduction for Qt. However, it seems to cut out about 350 pages in, putting subjects such as "Focus Handling" in its own 3 page chapter, rather than integrating it into an existing chapter. That said, the Portability chapter, which includes a list of Qt functions that are not portable, was a valuable addition.

Keep in mind, the 2nd edition of Programming for Qt was written for Qt 3. At the time of this review, the latest version of Qt is version 4. This is a problem because Trolltech appears to reinvent the wheel for each major version. While the author had me salivating at the thought of a QStyleSheet, checking the API docs for Qt 4 QStyleSheet is now a deprecated class, and as far as I can tell there is no current equivalent.

One aspect I wish the author had covered in more detail is the actual compiling and linking of applications that use Qt. I'm starting to get the impression that Trolltech's dirty little secret is that while their API is both clean and thorough, the signal/slot method is overly reliant on #defines, and the developer has to compile and link as many as twice the number of files to make it function. Trolltech includes a program 'qmake' almost as a bandaid which will generate Makefiles that will then automatically generate and compile the extra 'moc' files. The problem is that if you're porting an application to Qt, you're likely to have existing makefiles. Adding the additional layer of qmake and it's .pro files is both cumbersome and not actually necessary. While you can certainly figure out on your own how to avoid using qmake, it would have been helpful if the book described the functionality of the qmake-generated makefiles. This would help developers porting to Qt to include that functionality in their existing makefiles.

If you want to learn Qt, you'd better start with Qt4. This book is really for Qt3, but it's still full of useful examples and information. In order to get the code in this book to work, you should #include <Qt3Support> at the top of your code, and then add "CONFIG = release", "CONFIG += qt", and "QT += qt3support" to your *.pro project file. After that was done, I had no problems with the code from this book.

This book was out of date when I bought it 5 years ago. It was a good read, but I spent so much time on the web trying to figure out the NEW way QT wanted things done.

This is not a very good book on programming QT. It will help you get started and since it is like one of the only books written on QT you are kind of stuck. Once I got the hang of QT I never looked at the book again, though. Get your company to buy it, read it through a bit, and then use the API guide and code examples in your QT distribution. The sections on building QT were the most useful to me (windows platform), but that was about it. Otherwise, I would just read the examples from the distribution...

This book gives you a relatively quick and easy introduction to using Qt. You should know the fundamentals of C++ programming to benefit from the book. However, if you seriously want to get into using Qt are several much more up to date titles that also comes with a more modern and appetizing style. I bought this item because I have been using Qt for some time (Qt really rocks!) and went in to get all the books without critically reviewing before buying.

I personally own all three published books on the Qt GUI Toolkit by Trolltech. This one is by far the best of them. It is not a 5 star book, but it will teach you some of the more advanced uses of the Toolkit. It makes for a really great comanion to the Reference guide that comes with the toolkit.