Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK

Rating:
Summary: Reasonable first attempt.
Review: A reasonable first attempt at documenting the GTK toolkit, hopefully as GTK becomes more popular it will have competition.

My most serious problem with the book is the large amount of examples---just flicking through it seems to show every page with example code. Examples should not be used as a way of documenting an API, they should be used to _carefully_ illistrate selected points. And we don't need whole applications in the main text (they should be in an appendix).

Compare for example the definitive Motif programming books, O'Reilly 6/6A and Doug Young's "Programming and Applications with Xt/Motif", both have much more discussion about the fundimentals of the API, and they didn't pretend to document the lower levels (Xt/X11) like this book does with Glib/GDK.

Will I use it ? Yes. Will it become my defacto GTK document ? No. Do I wish it had more substance ? Yes.

Rating:
Summary: Good book for a fresh start.
Review: After reading the first several chapters of this book and looking at some of the example programs I was able to write a very nifty GUI on a Windows NT workstation. This book contains some valuable information about GTK+ that is not available in the GTK+ Tutorial. In addition, a chapter is dedicated to GDK which I found to be a good introduction to GDK - the drawing kit. There's not a lot of documentation on GDK. This certainly helps. This book also contains several "complete" examples programs which shows several key figures of the GTK+ widgets. Of course, there's some typo's and misprints.

Rating:
Summary: Very dissapointing
Review: Anybody who need to use the examples in this book will find that maybe only the example on P30 works. The rest is up to the uncertainty of the author as on P5, to which distribution of GTK+ would actually work with his examples and which of the compilers available might "maybe" work. Not worth it for anybody looking for a rigid text or tutorial. My personal view -- a complete waste of money.

Rating:
Summary: not worth it
Review: Anybody who need to use the examples in this book will find that maybe only the example on P30 works. The rest is up to the uncertainty of the author as on P5, to which distribution of GTK+ would actually work with his examples and which of the compilers available might "maybe" work. Not worth it for anybody looking for a rigid text or tutorial. My personal view -- a complete waste of money.

Rating:
Summary: Ignore the Reviews Below . . . This Book Rules!
Review: Don't listen to the reviews below. If you're just beginning in Linux app development like me, then you'll absolutely LOVE this book. I know I do. I'm making a game project now, after reading this book.

Don't get me wrong, this is a teaching book, not a reference (Linux Application Development is an excellent reference, BTW). Buy this and get in the Linux dev scene!

Rating:
Summary: Good intro to GTK+ and GLIB
Review: I bought this book last week, have read most of it by now, successfully downloaded and installed a version of GTK+ and GLIB in my RedHat5 LINUX, and have entered, successfully compiled, and run many of the GUI examples already. I just read these reviews below and exclaimed, "Boy! This book is not THAT bad." If you are a salty veteran of UNIX GUI, don't buy it, but I found it very helpful.

Maybe, given the incredible rapid growth of LINUX, in another year a better book will emerge (or perhaps a second edition of this one), but until then I haven't seen a better one. Also, regarding the "use the source comment": That is fine if you are already a Jedi Knight, but if not, this book gives you a few working examples to use as a blaster if no light saber is handy ...

Rating:
Summary: Writing GUI Applications
Review: I first read the preview of this book with the title Linux GUI Applications Development but i found it with the title Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK.

Anyway.I think that Mr Harlow did a very good job.Migrating from DOS/Windows programming to Linux it was hard to find books for console/XWindow programming.I used to read printed books and the online - electronic manual in the Internet confuse me very much. This book explains the use of GTK+ and GDK toolkit.There are many examples. After a few hours of reading i downloaded and installed the gtk+.1.2.0.tar.gz package very easy.Now i can explore the electronic manual more easily. There are some misprints but it does not bother me. The GTK+ - GDK toolkit remembers me the OOP Windows programming with Borland C++ and with the examples of this book i was able to write a few good looking "XWindows". I have still a lot of reading and experimantation, but i am in a good way. The GTK+ - GDK toolkit requires (I think) a quite good experience of C programming. I hope Mr Harlow continues to watch out the evolution of the GTK+ - GDK toolkit. And in the future i expect to give us a more extensive guide of this package or even a "Bible of GTK+ programming".

Special thanks to Amazon on line bookstore.Through its pages i could find some very good programming books (included this).

Minas Aristeidis Thessaloniki/Greece [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Pretty darn good book
Review: I have been programming console apps in pure, raw C for over ten years, but never could master GUI programming in Windows or X either. GTK has saved me from a GUI-less life, and Harlow's book was my introduction.

Sure, it's not perfect, but I learned a lot years ago from Herb Schildt's books (remember him?) HIS code was fragile as cut glass... but debugging is good practice, and some of his methods were brilliant. (but sloppy)

Eric Harlow is much better. Many of the errors in the code presented (gpointer *data at the end of a callback declaration, when it should be gpointer data, for instance) may well be typographical in nature. I downloaded the example code and built several of the programs with much less difficulty than many console apps I have ported.

Give the man a break. He was the first into the breach, so to speak. If you need a more advanced book, get Havoc Pennington's "GTK+/Gnome Application Programming" and have at it. I have both, and am still learning a lot from them.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty darn good book
Review: I have been programming console apps in pure, raw C for over ten years, but never could master GUI programming in Windows or X either. GTK has saved me from a GUI-less life, and Harlow's book was my introduction.

Sure, it's not perfect, but I learned a lot years ago from Herb Schildt's books (remember him?) HIS code was fragile as cut glass... but debugging is good practice, and some of his methods were brilliant. (but sloppy)

Eric Harlow is much better. Many of the errors in the code presented (gpointer *data at the end of a callback declaration, when it should be gpointer data, for instance) may well be typographical in nature. I downloaded the example code and built several of the programs with much less difficulty than many console apps I have ported.

Give the man a break. He was the first into the breach, so to speak. If you need a more advanced book, get Havoc Pennington's "GTK+/Gnome Application Programming" and have at it. I have both, and am still learning a lot from them.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent way to get started
Review: I looked at this book in the bookstore, was impressed by the quality of presentation, brought it home and was writing working applications in a few hours without any other documentation. If you need to get up to speed, I don't think you could do better than this; it's extremely well written and tells its story well.

It has a large sampling of examples, and I really liked them because they were useful in their own right, and tied into the things I wanted to use GTK for.

There are two significant flaws in this book. First, there were a number of embarassing errors that got past the copyreaders. Some functions had upper case in their names when printed; the actual functions are all lowercase. The gtk-config program takes options beginning with double hyphens, not single hyphens. This kind of sloppiness is annoying, and I'm sure there are many beginners who will stop learning, not realizing they are literally a hyphen away from success.

The second problem is that, once you're through the examples, what you really need is a reference book, and this work completely fails at it. The index is embarassingly incomplete, and many aspects of GTK are explained just well enough to get you started, which can leave you hanging later.

But the rest of the book is so well done that I can ignore those flaws. If you want or need to learn GTK, this is a fantastic introduction that will serve you well.