Programming with Qt

by Matthias Dalheimer

Book Overview

The popular open source KDE desktop environment for Unix was built with Qt, a C++ class library for writing GUI applications that run on Unix, Linux, Windows 95/98, Windows 2000, and Windows NT platforms. Qt emulates the look and feel of Motif, but is much easier to use. Best of all, after you have written an application with Qt, all you have to do is recompile it to have a version that works on Windows. Qt also emulates the look and feel of Windows,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596000642
• ISBN13: 9780596000646
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 520 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 9.1" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Very good book

I am new to Linux programming (I'm a .Net developer) and was a bit frustrated with the online tutorials for Qt and decided to give this book a try. I am very happy with the decision, this book is very well written. I like the style of the author, giving us some practical exercises after each topic, so we can improve the application he develops throughout the book (a "paintbrush"). Now that I understood the basics I can use the Qt documentation to do my own apps.People who like those huge, "step-by-step" ("click File->Quit to exit the application...") books might be a bit disappointed with this one though, the author assumes that the reader knows some C++ and can figure out some stuff by himself/herself, so be warned. Not that he skips any information needed, but he doesn't repeat the same thing 10x either, so you gotta be a bit "smart" to read this book.

excellent book for learning Qt

I hesitated to buy this after reading the negative reviews here. I am glad I did. It is exactly what I needed. It touches on the necessary basics of C++, event driven programming and covers how to download and install the Qt environment in the first chapter. The second is Hello World, the next few are guided tours of the major widgets, then some 20+ more chapters cover Qt by topic because it is much more than a GUI toolkit. The style is succinct yet easy to absorb. It took me about two days to read through it carefully. In that brief time now I just use the online Qt help for detail info.

Handy Programming Help

I find this book is very good. It provides quick help while programming, gives a lot of ideas how to solve problems, and a quick overview how the most common problems have to be dealt with.But - yes, there is a 'but' - it is definitively not a book about GUI programming, it's about QT! If you are familiar with GUI development, such as java/swing programming or similar, and you are also familiar with C++, this book can be a great help for development.

No better Qt book (that I know of)

For me personally, this book provides everything I'm looking for to learn Qt: widgets, signals and slots (i.e., event handling), q-make, "moc", multi-threading, Qt-Designer and more. I'm a Java programmer looking for something equally as portable but a bit trimmer and faster; Qt fits the bill nicely. The book is organized, concise and well written, so it does not need to be as thick as an automobile tire and almost as heavy (I abhor those huge books!). One does not need to know Java, but the reader should have at least a passing familiarity with C++ since Qt is not a language, it's a large and useful GUI library written in C++. One minor annoyance with the book is that the author frequently refers to important sections of the sample code by line number, but no numbers are provided with the code.

Nothing Better to learn Qt

For me personally, this book has everything I need: it covers Qt's Signals and Slots, widgets, "moc", animation, threading, accessing databases, q-make, Qt-Designer and more. And yet this book is only of medium size, which for me is a perfect fit: I abhor those "bibles" that are as thick as a car tire and almost as heavy! Does anybody ever read those things? Anyway, I'm a Java programmer looking for a language or OO library that's just as portable as Java but that's a bit faster and that I can compile natively so I only have to distribute an executable, not a whole run-time environment. Qt provides that with a lot of the same principles and design concepts. But even without Java experience, this book is very clear and easy to follow, so you'll be coding useful, interesting GUIs very quickly. Of course, you have to know at least a little C++, because Qt is a C++ library, not a language.