Customer Reviews

Writing Gnome Applications

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

 

 

Do NOT get this book! It's not worth your time. It's hard to describe how disappointed I was after reading this book. I'm not talking about the style with which the author presents his ideas (which is pretty good) but about the contents. GNOME stands for GNU Network Object Model Environment, which implies that CORBA is a big part of it. This book doesn't talk about ORBit, OAF or Bonobo at all (which are the libraries that implement CORBA environment in GNOME). I'm not sure how this book could even be named "Writing GNOME Applications". It doesn't talk about gconf, bonobo, gnorba, oaf, pango etc. All that, wouldn't be probably such a big problem because none of the books available today talks about those technologies. What made this book so unbearable in my eyes is the fact that author omits the concept of packing widgets!! You will NOT be able to write ANY useful application after reading this book. How can you write any graphical application with one widget? You can't. Oh, and author doesn't talk about creating widgets either. In conclusion, after reading this book you won't be able to write widgets, you won't be able to place more than one widget in your application, you won't be able to write any GNOME specific application, you won't be able to write a GTK+ application and you won't have a clue what the new and exciting technologies in GNOME are all about.

This is a book aimed mainly at the uninitiated in the world of UNIX and X-Window programming. It is, however, necessary that the reader has the basic knowledge of C programming.

In the beginning the book presents the reader with an overview of basic concepts of UNIX, X-Window system programming and the GLib and GTK+ libraries which are the foundations of GNOME libraries. For an in-depth understanding of these topics, further reading is necessary, but for the purposes of this book, they are covered well enough.

The reader is then provided with a thorough description of the GNOME libraries, especially the UI framework and with special emphasis on more complicated sections like the GNOME canvas, MDI and session management, which have chapters dedicated solely to them. It also discusses a lot of graphics related stuff including latest additions to GNOME like the gdk-pixbuf library which replaces the deprecated imlib. Throughout the book all the important and hard-to-understand issues are very well illustrated with example source code.

Yet another strong side of the book is the discussion of the GNU build system, which can be quite cryptic for the newcomers and migrants from the Windows world.

One of its weak points is the rather spartan coverage of the help system and preparation of documentation which tend to be the weak sides of most applications and would therefore require a better description.

To sum it up: an experienced UNIX programmer would perhaps rather use another, more reference-like book, but for a beginner that would like to get familiar with the world of GNOME programming as quickly and as painlessly as possible, this book is a must have!

This book has an easy reading style that supports the almost "hobby" or "fan club" interest of some of my undergraduate computer science students. The author, John Sheets, did what he set out to do: "My fervent hope is that this book will be useful to people as a learning tool, and as a reference guide. I've done my best to offer clear descriptions of how things work, while at the same time provide complete API listings and enough hands-on examples to give you a good intuitive feel for things."

This book is informative, yet straightforward. It is ambitious, but there is enough detail to get somewhere without getting lost in deadly unstated details. The author is also open to interaction with readers in the amazing and delightful nature of people who actively pursue projects like this and change the world along the way. I expect that readers will value the attitude expressed by the author that this book needs to be treated as an ongoing, evolving software project. The book in its current form is very good. With the hopes and attitude expressed by the author, it is something that I will recommend to my students who are capable and interested in GNOME. Without meeting John Sheets personally, I added a 5th star to my rating because I liked his attitude and his style.

A "must have" for starters, and a wonderful reference and guide (full of examples and code) for those already developing applications using GNOME!

Intended audience for this book must be able to understand simple C code. Some UNIX tools and environment experience would be desirable in order to fully deploy the content of this book. Basic knowledge about GTK+ would also be a plus, but not a must.

The most important feature of this book is that it covers GNOME 1.2. The next most important feature is the fact that subjects like Internationalization, GnomeMDI, Session Management and Documentation, have each one a hole chapter dedicated to its own. There is also a chapter on Graphics and another on The GNOME Canvas. This last one is worth John Sheets to deserve a hurray!, because the Canvas itself is not an easy issue to explain, and John does it wonderfully.

The remaining chapters covers the "usual suspects": A General overview on UNIX / GTK+ / GNOME, an analysis on the GNOME Build Environment, and a detailed "dissection" on Gnome Applications, like Menus, Toolbars and Dialogs. This book is a buy that worths every buck spent on it!

The author full fills his goal of giving an good introduction on how to write basic application for GNOME - going from makefiles over the GTK+ toolkit to the GNOME canvas as well as how to internationalize applications. This is an easy read, but personally I would like to have the code fragments placed closer to the text or on the opposite side, it has always irrated me when I have to move forward or backward to check out code which is referenced in the text.

This is a very nice introduction, but I am missing information about Orbit and how to use the ORB in my application or be used from other application. If you are experience GUI (C/C++) programmers from the X11/Motif/KDE background this will be very easy reading (too).