- Paperback: 696 pages
- Publisher: No Starch Press; 1 edition (8 Mar 2004)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1593270305
- ISBN-13: 978-1593270308
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 17.8 x 3.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,298,628 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product details
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Developers who write programs for GNOME use the GNOME API. Working with the GNOME API is preferable because the program will conform to the standard GNOME program look and feel. It also allows the developer to use the GNOME specific libraries in the program, greatly simplifying the development process. The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide is the official GNOME Foundation guide to programming GUIs and applications using the GTK+ and GNOME API. Developed in partnership with the GNOME Foundation, this book is for programmers working with the GNOME 2 desktop environment. Each section begins with an example program that serves as a tutorial, then develops into a reference on the topic. Includes abundant, well-annotated examples. Knowledge of the C programming language is required, but no GUI programming experience is necessary.
Matthias Warkus has been using Linux since the age of sixteen. He has worked with the GNOME Foundation to produce the German localization of GNOME, published articles and lectured on GNOME, and spent considerable time working on the GNOME source code.
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This book was a delightful exception. As its introduction promises, the content "lies somewhere between a tutorial and a reference". The code examples are often just the kind of things you would write yourself to test-drive your understanding; no unnecessary fluff. There are complete programs also, and these are downloadable from the No Starch web site.
Matthias Warkus has a real knack for explaining complex subjects. I particularly liked his way of explaining object inheritance, which is completely upside down from the way it is usually presented, and thereby makes a much more understandable case for using OO code.
The first chapter is an overview of GLib capabilies. I was quite surprised at the things GLib includes: I come from the days when you needed to buy commercial libraries to get features like memory management, linked lists, B-trees, etc. The second chapter covers GObject, which adds Object Oriented capability to standard C programming. That's an important aspect of Gnome: it is plain vanilla C with the OO stuff added on through the GObject library. For those of us who have yet to be entranced by C++, that's important.
Chapters three and four explain GTK+ and the Gnome libraries, the overlap between them, and hen you'd use either. Chapter five is a lucid introduction to Glade, the interactive development tool for Gnome. I was interested to note that Glade produces XML files that your programs references through calls to Glade libraries.
The rest of the book is miscellaneous coverage that wasn't covered elsewhere; compiling issues, configuration helpers like Gconf. I had ben previously unaware of the GnomeVFS discussed in chapter eight which allows your program to transparently access remote web servers and archive formats like PKzipped files.
All in all, this looks like a very good intro to Gnome GUI development.
One small minus is that page numbers in Index are unaccurate, showing two pages bigger value where the content can actually be found.. Not a big problem, with this book and API documentation GTK+/Gnome development becomes much easier than before!!