Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Qt Programming in 24 Hours

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

 

 

If you are new to GUI programming in general or Qt programming in particular, this book will get you off the ground and running towards writing your own Qt applications. It is clearly written with many simple examples that illustrate how to use the basic Qt tools. The book also has exercises at the end of each chapter as well as several "hooks" to get you to check the official online Qt docs. I would have given the book full marks if the author hadn't wasted chapters on specific tasks such as programming for KDE, using OpenGL, or programming Netscape plugins. If you are interested in these tasks, it's a 5-star book, but I would have preferred a couple of advanced chapters covering Qt's built-in threading classes or other less task-specific topics.

Note that this book is basically a "stepping stone" to get you going from scratch. After you've finished this book, you will likely not refer to it as much as the official Qt documentation that trolltech provides with most Qt packages. I recommend that beginners start with this book, and then move on to try the tutorial "cannon" program that comes with the official docs.

This is definitely the best introductory book available at present on Qt.

I must admit that, in general, I don't like the "Teach Yourself.." series from Sams, as I generally find that despite the good ansatz of "teach by doing" that the books tend to be 'thrown together' in too much of a hurry. Often they end up being little more than a collection of "click here, type this, and now you understand what happened" lectures, that lack good descriptions and explanations of why the examples work, and how one could change them to suit one's needs.

However there is a distinctive lack of Qt books on the market as of this writing: 3 in English: Solin (this book), Dalheimer (pub: O'Reilly edition 1) , and Ward (pub: Hewlett Packard) 1 in German: Leaner (pub: Addison Wesley, edition 2.. a thorough and helpful book too incidentally), and 1 in Japanese, with the "Official Qt Documentation" soon to be published. So I bought the book, albeit it with reservation, and started reading with scepticism.I was very pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong in this case.

The book is extremely well written with great attention to detail. The author is careful to cover lots of ground at a sufficient (but not pedantically nity gritty) level, with a self-contained and simple example for each of the many topics/Qt classes covered, making this an ideal introduction to and preparation for the (extensive and coherent) online Qt documentation. All other Qt books presently available have the serious failing that they do not have enough examples to illustrate the discussions in the book. Dalheimer has several versions of a single example and otherwise only code snippets (this is by the way the next best book in my opinion), and Ward has no complete examples worth mentioning (this book is highly overpriced, and not worth buying in my opinion. Borrow it from a library perhaps. It has a slightly outdated version of Qt (2.1) on an accompanying Cd which is something the other books don't have though.. perhaps a positive consideration for those with slow internet connections).

The author's email address is also printed in the book, and he was kind enough to answer promptly and send me the example source code, when I wrote to him. (Something the publisher's didn't...another black mark for Sams). The book also contains very helpful information on installing/setting up Qt , and even includes a chapter overviewing object orientated programming (Qt uses C++ as opposed to C. If you're completely new to C++ or object orientated concepts you should probably read an introductory book (Lafore's and Deitel's excellent works spring to mind) on that before trying to do any serious programming with Qt).

All in all this book is excellent and well worth buying. The only possible room for improvement/change in future editions would be the possible inclusion of a Cd with the example code and a current version of Qt, and sections covering the newer topics such Qt Designer and database programming (intended for inclusion in Qt 3.0), and the proposed Visual C++ integration Wizard (currently (version 2.2.4) implemented as a the seperately compilable qmsdev.dll ).

This is a good book for the last version of Qt but not great for the current one (as of 8/27/2002). It also has significant proofreading errors in it, implying that it was written in more or less the same amount of time that you're supposed to read it. However, it is an easy-to-read introduction to Qt programming and is nice for beginners (I recall a quote saying "of course, if you're a professional programmer you wouldn't have gotten this book" -- and I *am* a professional programmer). The O'Reilly book is a better choice if you already know programming; and if you don't know programming you probably shouldn't be starting with Qt. :)

There are not that many books available for QT so I had to settle on this Sams Title. I usually dislike these "Teach yourself ... in 24 hours or 1 hour or 2 minutes..." books, but this one is fantastic. This book assumes C and C++ experience. If you only know C but also have a good understanding of Object Oriented Programming, then you'll be fine. The chapters are brief but very effective and there are great exercises at the end of each chapter.

I recommend this book to anyone who needs to learn more about QT.

Don't waste your money. This book would be helpful in getting you started using Qt, but the examples and coverage are no better or more complete than the tutorial included with the qt package. This book introduces basic Qt tools, but doesn't give any suggestions for how to use them in actual applications. Even the simple example applications at the trolltech website are more practical than the examples in this book.

Before I went out to buy this book, I visited the publisher's and Amazon web sites because I was feeling apprehensive about how trivial a 24 hour Teach Yourself series get. After I had gone through the review, I feel that there is hope in learning C++ GUI development after all. Qt and Daniel, the author give beginners as a programmer a chance to shine. I attempted Visual C++ with a couple of books, and nothing came close to a good concept as portrayed as Qt and Daniel as a wonderful writer. I agree with one of the reviewers before me, there should be a CD consists of Qt GUI tools software bundled with it.

I gave it 5 stars because it's easy to follow, which I presume people with some basic C++ programming background would be interested in purchasing this book and this book covers alot. I'm going to look into a more detailed book by the same author which is also on sale and listed on Amazon if I'm not mistaken.

I would've given it five stars, but I didn't like how it tried to fill up the 24 hours with how to use the widgets. Qt is pretty consistent (like any good library should be), and most of the methods work similarly enough that it's easy to figure out (like how to set the size). I would have like to have seen either more advanced topics or more indepth coverage of the advanced topics.

If you are looking to learn this is not the book becuase you will quickly get frustrated with the errors that the book has. You cannot make mistakes in code! If you are looking for a companion to a primary book to better understand some things and work out the errors in this book then it is not a terrible purchase. I do not mind grammatical errors but when you are coding and learning to code it is a huge problem and dissapointment. It will help you through some things in QT.

The book is lucid and follows much of the beginner's pages from the trolltech web site. However, it would have been nice to get a cdrom with both book examples and the GNU license-free version of the QT library.

This a very easy to read book. It explains the basics to start writing Qt programs. I give it high scores.