Customer Reviews

The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt, OSF/Motif (2nd Edition)

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This well written book, with numerous coded examples (that work!) is one of the best computer reference book I've encountered. Although it has not been updated to included Motif 2.1, most applications are still being written in Motif 1.2 anyway. It also includes the necessary Xt and X11 background to write GUIs. I went from zero experience with windows programming to writing full featured X-windows applications solely with the aid of this text and elementary knowledge of C. The author, who worked at Silicon Graphics, went on to write the Open Inventor library (which unfortunately is in C++). Great book!

I learned X-Windows programming from this many years ago. Please bear with me as I set up the scenario here. As an independent consultant, I was in a situation where--in order to win a juicy federal contract--I had to represent that I was sufficiently expert in X-Windows to (a) build a toolkit of custom widgets; (b) build tools that allowed users to choose from a set of predefined "color palettes" such that (b-i) only certain classes (let's call them "Brand Q") of applications followed those palettes, other applications following the standard system palette, and (b-ii) the palettes interacted with the window manager such that, when the last Brand Q application was iconified, the standard system palette was restored, yet, as soon as any Brand Q application was deiconified, the user's chosen palette was reinstantiated; and (c) build tools that enabled a Certified Professional Ergonomist, or CPE (!), to experiment with widget appearances and parameters so as to craft an optimal set of palettes and then represent those palettes in such a way that X applications would properly follow what was visually intended. Oh, on top of all that, it had to interact with a visual GUI builder called UIM/X that implemented a whole set of "shadow widgets" that paralleled Motif widgets and let you edit their properties--rather like a Java "bean editor" one might find useful nowadays.

Well, I had to learn enough to write a thick, highly literate design document within a couple of weeks, and then go out and build some 40K lines' worth of applications code (in C, of course) and 15K lines' worth of "system" code (I'd define as "systems code" software that (a) interacts with the window manager vis-a-vis iconification and deiconification semantics; (b) communicates complex data structures via interning atoms with the X server; (c) tortures strange color mapping behaviors from an outdated NCR monitor that could only physically display sixteen colors at a time [thus having to rely on dithering and related visual effects to achieve other "colors"] and offers tools for related colormap management tasks) within a handful of months.

Now, I'm not complaining about the level of effort--given the six-figure consulting fee that lay at the end of the rainbow. But without Young's outstanding book, I'd have been dead in the water. Oh, of course I had access to the O'Reilly series of seven or eight books--which were occasionally useful for stealing a handy application that could quickly be incrementally modified (e.g., I needed quick code for a dialogue box managing three green buttons, and one of the O'Reilly books illustrated the code for a dialogue box sporting four yellow buttons). But Young taught me enough about X that I was soon empowered to write my own functions to populate recursive pull-down menus; to write the internals for a widget that borrowed functionality from two other widgets and used cutesy memory management tricks (akin to mainframe-lingo "lookaside buffers") that let me sequentially stack up their respective resources; and to learn how to take advantage of some interesting internals facts, e.g., that the XmN family of symbolic constants are defined as strings identical to their names (a la #define foo #foo).

Bravo, Mr. Young! You taught me much, and you taught me well.

Once upon a time, when I moved from Windows programming environment to X-Windows.. I found things were so diffiult for me.

Lucky me, one day I went to the library and found this book. It helped me to get start with X programming in s considerable short time. The step of this book is quite easy to follow, and not difficult to understand. At least it made X more friendly to me. Although it was Japanese edition and my Japanese isn't that good. (And I will buy the English edition soon).

If you want to program in X, this one is a must, Along O'Reilly X Reference Series (which I think is the best of X-Ref).

Well, I never knew that I can get used books also with almost like new standards. I am not able to find out any kind of mark or torn pages in the book on the first look. It was awesome. Book was delivered on time.
And moreover the used book like new book in such a low cost!!! What else one need??