Developing Linux Applications

By Eric Harlow

Providing a handbook for developers who are moving to the Linux platform, this book covers the GTK+ library, including GLIB and GDK using C. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735700214
• ISBN13: 9780735700215
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Sams Publishing
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 8.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Pretty darn good book

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.

Ignore the Reviews Below . . . This Book Rules!

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!

An excellent way to get started

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.

great book

this is a great book to add to your linux programming collection