Sams Teach Yourself Qt Programming in 24 Hours (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Sams Teach Yourself Qt Programming in 24 Hours will teach the reader how to quickly and easily write graphical programs for both X Windows-based systems (Linux, etc.) and Microsoft Windows systems. Consisting of 24 one-hour lessons, Sams Teach Yourself Qt in 24 Hours is divided into six sections that guide the reader through the language from the basics to the advanced functions. The first section of the book teaches the fundamentals of Qt. Building upon what has been taught in the first section, sections two through six show the reader how to apply that knowledge and make Qt a programming language they can use to fulfill their programming needs. Topics Include the Qt Class Library, basic and advanced graphics, creating custom GUI widgets, OpenGL, Netscape and Explorer plug-ins, and Qt GUI builders.

From the Back Cover

Sams Teach Yourself Qt Programming in 24 Hours will teach the reader how to quickly and easily write graphical programs for both X Windows-based systems (Linux, etc.) and Microsoft Windows systems. Consisting of 24 one-hour lessons, Sams Teach Yourself Qt in 24 Hours is divided into six sections that guide the reader through the language from the basics to the advanced functions. The first section of the book teaches the fundamentals of Qt. Building upon what has been taught in the first section, sections two through six show the reader how to apply that knowledge and make Qt a programming language they can use to fulfill their programming needs. Topics Include the Qt Class Library, basic and advanced graphics, creating custom GUI widgets, OpenGL, Netscape and Explorer plug-ins, and Qt GUI builders.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Sams; illustrated edition edition (May 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0672318695
• ISBN-13: 978-0672318696
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #759,399 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gets you off the ground, April 23, 2001

By	Daniel Lyddy (San Jose, CA, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Introductory book available on Qt, February 22, 2001

By	Declan Moran (Ireland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 ).

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A little outdated, and not proofread, August 28, 2002

By	Chris Verburg (San Jose, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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. :)