[KDE-India] Hello KDE India : Introducing Myself

[Nikhil Marathe]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Amandeep Singh <aman.dedman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am Aman (irc : dedman) , a student of computer science from Delhi.
>
Hi Aman, nice to meet you :)

> I love KDE Software and have been using it for over a year. I
> especially love using Amarok, Kate, Kopete, KMail and the Plasma
> Desktop as a whole.

Fantastic, that is the only criteria required to contribute to KDE,
knowledge is secondary.

>
> I understand that for contributing to KDE, I should learn Qt. I have
> started on basic Qt tutorials and I am planning on buying the book
> "C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4" by Blanchette and Summerfield.

Yes Qt is essential to understand KDE. The book btw is excellent, I
learnt a lot of stuff from its Qt 3 version around 6 years ago.
I would recommend not reading the book from front to back but digging
into the first few chapters which discuss the fundamentals and then
just leafing through the chapters discussing various APIs so that you
have an idea of where to hunt around when you are looking for certain
features. After that the Qt documentation should be more than enough.
Start with a few small projects to get familiar with Qt.

The 'problem' with contributing to core KDE is that it can be a major
pain setting up the build environment. (I believe project neon has
simplified this a lot, shadeslayer should be able to help with that).
On the other hand, contributing to small KDE applications is very easy
since you don't need a full trunk checkout.
I would suggest you also get familiar with a version control system
like Git (used by KDE) since if you start using it for your small
projects it becomes easier to use with KDE.

Hope that clears your way,
Nikhil