New to the list - Suggestion: Book recommendations on the HP

[Sebastian Röder]

Hello to everybody on this list!

Finally I managed to do the first steps in direction to becoming a KDE 
devel ;-)

I want to investigate into KDE coding since a long time, thought about helping 
my favorite KDE digikam and amarok for example and recently got the idea of 
starting by supporting kde-education. KVocTrain (which I use to learn the 
Russian language) needs a maintainer ...

OK, but that's still a long way to go cause I only have some basic PASCAL 
knowledge ATM. So I bookmarked the KDE Programming HowTo and do the first 
step right now: Learning C++.

And here comes my first idea to improve the situation for people who ones want 
to become devels (but are actualy bloody noobs as me): A section with book 
recommendations!

For C++ you recommend "Thinking C++" in the HowTo but I searched the web for 
it and many reviews of the book pointed out that it is not that good with 
regards to didactic expecialy.

I spend quite some time to search for good C++ books, and it will be even 
harder to find good QT/KDE books, not to speak about a book that covers all 
three topics in parallel (this is my personal dream *g*).

I find it VERY IMPORTANT to start diving into the topic with a good book - and 
good means for me in this situation:

* written in the native language of the reader (I am German and in general 
have no problems with English but when I have a book in my mouther tongue it 
helps me to not put the book away too early)

* providing a clear structure with small units/portions that each deal with a 
special topic

* combining theory, examples and exercises and tipps about best practices

* beeing fun to read, not too technical (man page style) and not too swallow 
(20p+ biography of the people behind C++)

* fitting the general topic C++ --> QT --> KDevelop, e.g. not 1000 pages of C 
language or dealing with Visual Studio

* usefull (non-nonsense) code examples in the exercises

* to be continued

OK, at least some of this points are not very objective I think, but anyway.

I would like to discuss the idea of establishing a book recommendations 
section on the KDE Quality HP (or maybe the wiki, with link to the HP). In my 
opinion this should be categorized by language (En, Ger, F, ...) and maybe by 
sub-categories like C++, QT, KDevelop.

The aim would be to collect book reviews about good and bad books of this 
topic and the extra benefit is that the reviewers can stat whether the books 
are exspecialy good/bad for the KDE devel "path".

I could start to write a review about "C++ lernen und professionell 
anwenden" (German) soon. This seems to be a good book for the German 
audience.

Your commends?

P.S. One could do a similar category for free books/internet ressources