Customer Reviews

Programming with QT: Writing Portable GUI Applicat: Writing Portable GUI applications on UNIX and Win32

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

 

 

I don't think this book is so bad as some people said below. It does what it was writen for - teaches programming Qt.

I don't agree that this book doesn't contain good samle codes. While reading it I compiled and ran the most of examples.

The problem with the book is that it's based on the obsolete version of Qt (1.4x, current is 2.02), so some classes and functions have changed a bit.

Reading the Qt mailing list I noticed that many people who start reading fail to compile the very 1st example "Hello, World"at p.13, because now QLabel constructor has different arguments. But the book has errata page in the Internet, you may check it.

In any case right now it's the only Qt book. Troll Tech people are still preparing their own (Qt: The Officiak Documentation).

I enjoyed this book thoroughly. I'm not sure what the other reviewers are talking about when they say that the book was riddled with errors; I didn't notice any (I suppose if there were any, they were easily fixed), and had absolutely no problems getting the code to compile. Qt is a great toolkit, and this is an excellent introduction. The only thing I would have changed about this book is to make every chapter have some exercises instead of only the first few chapters.

This book was useful to me as at the time there really were not other QT books except TrollTech's Website. However, beware of this book. It has MANY MANY typos and major mistakes, many of which are in the programming examples.

As a good typist, I generally like to type in programming examples as it makes me read and think about the code - rather than just blindingly copying it. Beware, there are MANY mistakes in the source code. Several do NOT compile! I spent a long time finding mistakes. I even sent the fixes to the author and the publisher. They thanked me the first few times, and then never replied to my later postings. You figure they would have appreciated all of them AND should have pointed out other mistakes before I ran into them (since others must have pointed out these mistakes as well).

Even though signals/slots are covered these are SUCH a LARGE component of Qt that the book does not even begin to really discuss the complexities of them enough. To be fair, the author points this out, but to not deal in detail with signals/slots when learning Qt is a big handicap. Not dealing with signals/slots in detail with LOTS of EXAMPLES is sort of a cop-out.

I found this book to be clearly written, and not difficult to follow and succinct, and not sufficient to answer enough of my programming questions to feel comfortable creating my own programs. You definitely need to study the Troll Tech-provided documentation to go very far beyond the book in programming, but the documentation reads like it was written as a reference, for people who understand but simply need a reminder. The book needs about two hundred more pages explaining examples and critical subjects like slot-signal interactions, layouts and many of the widgets more completely.

This book makes a good overview, but needs more depth. At the time, it was about the only book available, so I cannot say that it was a mistake to get the book when I did. I hope that other books coming out on Qt have more depth and more complete explanations.

First, I'm not exactly a GUI hacker, so you'll have to bear with my relative lack of knowledge in this area.

I do believe that Qt is mostly that: 'Cute'. It also is an excellent candidate for 'easy' GUI programming. What I wanted to find out among other things was whether Qt is a potential industrial strength full replacement of either Motif or the Windows API or both.

Unfortunately, Matthias' book falls a little short of the answer, being too loyal to Qt to point out any shortcomings. It rightfully, if drily and repetitively, points out why Qt might be better or more suitable for easy-to-write (relatively speaking) and somewhat portable GUI-based applications.

The book faithfully takes you through all the details of the tutorials which are arranged in suitably increasing difficulty. In the last few chapters it also discusses version 2.0 of Qt (yet to be released), the Perl interface and the available GUI builders.

The book isn't designed as a reference manual, so you will have to stick with the Qt online reference. The tone of the book is rather dry and occasionally repetitive, which works somewhat like your favorite Latin teacher.

What's missing? A discussion of Qt's features compared to established GUIs (in particular customization and 'Desktop' issues), a stronger connection to the KDE project (after all, it _is_ possible to write a Window Manager using Qt, so what did that take?) and maybe a little more casual tone or even humor.

This is indeed a very good book but it can't compete with Solin's "Qt Programming" (published by Sams) as an introduction (at least not in it's present 1st edition..perhaps the soon to be published 2nd edition will be such an improvement that this situation will change, but I think that's unlikely). Depending on your budget and the improvements that come into edition 2, this is a worthwhile addition to any Qt programmer's bookshelf.

The main weakness of the book is the shortage of succinct and simple examples that illustrate the various Qt classes and concepts. (This is where Solin, on the other hand excels). There is one hefty example (Qtscribble) that is presented in various versions in the chapters 2 and 3. The rest of the book presents only code snippets and (worthwhile) discussions. Edition 1 is also quite outdated so waiting for edition 2 is very advisable.

i read this book the other day and was disappointed. it is full of errors and typos (a few of which were extremely misleading and i wasted hours of my time to figure out that the book itself was wrong). there are absolutely no decent full code samples. the few that are in the book are only 1 or 2 lines long and do not provide enough info. i will say that i am now semi-knowledgeable in the Qt realm, but most of it came from sources other than this book.

--- "I believe the technical term is 'oops!'"

Honestly I copied word per word every code and none of them seem to compile. I wentto the KDE webpage and their samples compiled successfully. Further more this guy who made this book only has copied the Qt manual and his samples none of them work. This Book is not worth it, I bought and returned it.

Easy reading introduction into GUI programming with qt in C++. The book focuses on qt without applying C++ exception handling or the standard template library. It also does not explain too deeply the workings behind qt's callback system, but just, how to use it. After reading the book I could immediately make a GUI on Linux. Earlier it took me much longer to do the same thing with Motif. The qdesigner which comes with qt2.2.0 takes away a lot of work. The book also explaines other capabilities of qt than the GUI main topic (e.g. socket handling class, qt container classes, etc.). The help pages of the new qdesigner will also help one in applying the teaching of this book.

This book is a great book for one with a lot of C++ experience in programming and for one who likes to hunt and peck at debugging. But, unless one has an older version of Qt, it can be quite trying because so much has changed in the newer versions.

I would say this book is generally inexpensive and can be useful as a backup reference source. I was able to get all the way up to the Scribble program using the later version of Qt3. But after that, it became very difficult to upgrade the code to Qt3.

The three star rating I gave this book is only because it is outdated. It is a good book and delves into the code in detail, however outdated.