Greetings.
Someone at the meeting was looking for a recommendation for a Qt4
book. The one I have, which is okay but less than spectacular,
is "C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4" by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark
Summerfield, ISBN 0-13-18724904. Reviews of this book are mixed.
The caviats I have about the book:
- The authors tend to show code first and then explain it
afterwards, which is a bit disconcerting because it means
first trying to read something new with no idea of what it
is, and then finding out what it means afterwards.
- Unfortunately as Sean Dague mentioned in his Rails talk tonight,
this books's explanation of MVC (Model-View-Controler) is likewise
confusing and I didn't get it, but it's likewise because Qt4 does
not do real MVC, and instead uses either model/view or something
they call "model-view-delegate".
- There are two methods discussed concerning making dialog boxes; a
"manual" method in which you can program how a window and set of
widgets will appear, and a "rapid dialog design" method using
Qt Designer. You'd think that the rapid dialog design would be
a cool thing, but it's not. The problem is that there are things
you can do when manually programming a dialog box that you simply
cannot do in Qt Designer -- or at least that's what I've found.
Personally I've given up on Qt Designer for making dialogs
altogether because when I've used it I've ended up stuck and
having to go back and program the dialog box manually anyway.
"Qt Assistant" was the documentation browser I was trying to think of
the name of. There's a "Tutorials and Examples" section in there
under "Qt Documentation Reference".
"The Book of Qt 4: The Art of Building Qt Applications" looks like it
has gotten better reviews, but I haven't read it yet to be able to
compare it. If I can get access to it at the library, I'll have a
look at it.
There's another book, "An Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with
Qt 4" which you can download chapter 9 for free now and will
eventually be released in total for free as PDF here:
http://www.informit.com/promotions/promotion.aspx?promo=135563
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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Feb 4 - Ruby on Rails
Mar 4 - TBD
Apr 1 - TBD
