[dot] Book Review: Foundations of Qt Development

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1190196725/

From: Jonathan Riddell & Johan Thelin <e8johan at gmail.com> onWednesday 19/Sep/2007, @03:12
Dept: essential-books


Book Review: Foundations of Qt Development
==========================================

   A few weeks ago the APress title Foundations of Qt Development
[http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590598318] left the printing presses.
The book introduces Qt in a step by step fashion, but also delves into
most areas of the toolkit. The highlights include an in-depth look at
the model/view classes,  as well as introductions to all the tools and
widgets needed to get started.  The publishers were kind enough to send
KDE Dot News a copy of the book, read on for a short review.

     There have been a number of Qt 4 books published recently, which is
a good sign of a platform with a healthy and growing developer
community.  One of the problems for authors is that Qt is already one of
the best documented programming libraries around, however there will
always be a need for books from people who need a tutorial to get a good
starting tutorial or to teach them all the corners of Qt.

     This book starts with an assumption that the reader knows C++ and
has some understanding of its standard template library.  It jumps in to
describing the Qt style of C++ and how it is different to STL.  The rest
of part 1 describes using widgets, dialogues, Qt Designer and main
windows.  In only four chapters the reader will have a good
understanding of the most important parts of Qt.

     Part 2 covers every section of the Qt library starting with
Interview, the model view classes.  Other chapters include creating your
own widgets, files, translations, using plugins, multi threading,
databases, networking, build systems with a detailed discussion of QMake
and CMake (a must for KDE developers) and unit testing.

     At the book's site you can download example source code as well as
the sample chapter "Files, Streams and XML". The book is available both
as a ordinary paper book and as a eBook. As a live appendix to the book,
the site thelins.se/qt [http://www.thelins.se/qt] provides links,
resources and articles.

     While not a book for a beginner programmer, or even a beginner to
GUI programming, this is a book with a thorough and complete coverage of
Qt and would suit well those looking to move to a better development
framework or even those who use Qt but want to better understand the
complete power of KDE's most important library.