Rating: 
Summary: Details about the book
Review: I wrote this book as a project to get more documentation about Linux to developers. There seemed to be very few books on writing GUI applications for Linux - and none on GTK.The book covers the GLIB library and then focuses on covering GTK and its widgets. There are many widgets in GTK, so I merely covered the more frequently used widgets - the rest should be easy to figure out once the basics are understood. Finally, the book goes into the GDK library for drawing graphics within widgets. Included is a GTK version of minesweeper, a mini word processor, a 3d molecule viewer, and a game which looks a bit like the old arcade game 'defender'. There are many other smaller programs used to illustrate the use of the widgets that are discussed. There is no discussion of CORBA in the book despite what the description says. It focuses on developing GUI applications for Linux.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but missing important concepts
Review: If you are looking for a top-level guide to the most basic GTK+ functions, this might work for you. If you are looking for detailed explanations of components, an understanding of the inner workings of GTK+, or any information on graphics go elsewhere. The author skipped over graphics contexts (GC) completely; given the nature of the library, this amazes me.
Rating: 
Summary: Very dissapointing
Review: Im a 13 year old computer wiz, and found this book at my local bookstore. i program in VB and C so i thought this would be no challenge at all. When i started to read the book i was dissapointed by the lack of examples and useful content. It is more like a handbook to look back and see the syntax for widgets. i thought the source code was too long to post in the book," a cd should have come with the book with all of the latest GTK+ libraries and examples". im just telling you this so you dont spend 30$ thinking your getting a quality book.
Rating: 
Summary: Nifty, helpful, but not perfect.
Review: Just got this book today, so don't accept this review as the gospel truth, but I mostly know what I'm talking about. It looks good for a programming book, as in general most of these kinds of books are rather idiotic. Eric obviously has a passion for what he does as well as a sense of humor. I was also pleased that the book is relatively up-to-date; Eric chose to write it for the latest GTK at the time (1.1.5) rather than for the stable GTK (1.0.x), forseeing that the version of GTK available when the book actually hit stores would be newer and not backwards-compatible with 1.0. (Right now, it's 1.2.0.) The code is clear, and the necessary information is conveyed. However, the book has some problems, most of them relatively minor. It suffers as a reference manual; Eric makes passing references to some critical functions without adequate explanation, and the index is somewhat incomplete. Some parts are vague, like when he refers to certain widgets or makes passing references to projects like Gnumeric. A little bit of incorrect terminology is used; for example, looking at the title, there is nothing Linux-specific about GTK, the subject of this book. (It's even been ported to Windows, where it could potentially reach an even larger audience than the Linux community.) Furthermore, the book is typeset a little distractingly; punctuation appears to have less space after it than the space found between words, and some code wraps onto extra lines unnecessarily. Finally, and most critically, this book reads like a rewrite of the GTK Tutorial by Tony Gale and Ian Main, available free with GTK. The Tutorial is incomplete and a little brief, but it's more authoratative as it's from the source and it uses some better methods, perhaps because some of the methods weren't available with the older GTK that Eric was using. In its defense, this book does cover a little more ground than the Tutorial, as it goes into GDK as well, and the example code makes better use of the widgets than the Tutorial's code does. If you want to develop with GTK, you can't easily print out the Tutorial, and you'd like a more robust guide than the Tutorial, than this book is for you. Otherwise, I'd take a look at it in a bookstore for a minute before plunking down your cash; it will probably be worth it anyway, though. (I'll certainly find it useful, even though I do have a printed copy of the Tutorial.)
Rating:
Summary: Get Off this silly bandwaggon maan..,Linux=Solaris5yearsago.
Review: Listen Maan!, The maturing and commercialization of Linux is going to make it just another Unix with propriatory libraries and expensive applications. Do you think Oracle for Linux is going to be any cheaper than Oracle for Solaris if the performance was the same? Keep dreaming Geeks!
Rating: 
Summary: Not totatally worthless, but of very little value
Review: OK, This book looked great at first glance, but as many of the other reviewers have said, it was totally worthless as a reference. The stuff on the web, even though sketchy in some places, was miles ahead. I have had to look throught the source code for really tough questions. I hope that O'Reilly gets a book out. I have been tempted to go back to Motif because it has really good reference manuals.
Rating:
Summary: very unprofessional
Review: There are a number of factors that separate good toolkit programmer manuals from less gifted ones: * There should be a number of rather large realistic examples - not just dozens of snippets rivaling the "Hello, World's" complexity. In this sense, Harlow's book is fine: there are good examples of real-life programs that could get the programmer going. * There should be no cheesy stripped down (and ultimately useless) API reference, occupying the last third of a book. This book doesn't make this mistake either. * API calls described must be presented clearly, with all parameters documented and return values explained. And that's where this book screws it up real bad. Let me make it clear - it will be almost impossible for you to try any of the smaller examples from the book without having access to the API reference (or another book for that matter). I mean, having an example like: htable = g_hash_table_new(HashValueKey, HashValueComparator); how am I supposed to figure out what the type of htable is? And most examples in the book are just like that. This is a serious problem with the book that should've been caught by the editor or by anyone trying to look at the text with a fresh set of eyes.
And it is a pity - this book doesn't violate the two main principles stated above so it could've been the best one on the subject.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, excellent for starters, not quite perfect
Review: This book gave me an excellent overview of programming in GTK. The examples are great, but there were a few things that I did not like about it. Mr. Harlow tries to use full application code for explaining concepts. He should stick the full code in the Appendices and give more detailed explanation of what is essential in the body. Case in point: the chapter on developing your own widgets is pretty darned bad. The actual code example was fine, but I was uncertain about whether this is the norm or the exception. When presenting new commands, there sometimes is no explanation about what each of the arguments to the function mean. This is usually shown in the example code, but ... I look forward to reading Mr. Harlow's later editions of this same book, and I still would recommend this book to any beginning programmer in GTK. I wish there were more books like this one.
Rating:
Summary: Largely a beginners book. Use the source Luke.
Review: This book is useful for those who want to be guided through VERY basic GUI 'application' development. IMO the title and the content do not coincide. It is unlikely that this book will do much to aid the development of an actual application. I do not know which came first, but the book duplicates much of the documentation freely available at many web locations. Specific weakness: NO coverage for many GTK calls, limited depth in coverage of utilized calls, marginally useful index, lack of explaination of widget interactions, limited explaination of call parameters and overly simple application examples. I think this book might be useful for beginning Linux developers but that audience requires much more background material in order for this book's material to be helpful in that niche. So that I am not completely negative I should mention that I have a burgeoning programmer in my home and I now use this book, along with K&R, O'Reilly Make and a Unix Nutshell book as learning tools for my son's Linux development efforts.
Rating:
Summary: Better than nothing, but...
Review: This book just isn't very complete. If someone totally new to gtk were to use this book from which to learn, they'd have problems right off the bat - some _very_ significant typos (like the compiler arguments on p.29) and total lack of documentation in several places (see others' comments). Luckily, I already knew a bit of GTK+ and could work around the errors, although the 'missing' documentation bugs me. Some of Mr. Harlow's code is really weird, too - strange pointer conversion creates a compiler warning (p.53), along with some other examples I don't feel like finding. It is a decent book for my purposes - it's like learning from the source, but with a little more documentation. If you know your way around GUIs and have money to spend, go for it.
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