Contents |
The Official Gnome 2 Developer's Guide by Matthias Warkus.
If you plan to develop desktop applications for the Gnome desktop environment, then this book will be a very worthwhile investment. There are numerous documents available on the web to help you understand developing for Gnome, but this book covers many of the more important aspects of Gnome development and packages it in a very easy to use fashion.
If you are looking for an in-depth API reference for Gnome, this book will not fulfill you needs as it does not try to be the end-all reference for the Gnome APIs, but rather focuses on the most widely used APIs and how to utilize them in your development.
You also will not find complete application examples as part of this book. It provided many small, code samples that are designed to provide you with a foundation for implementing complete solutions.
What you need to bring with you to get the most out of this book is a very good understanding of Gnome as a user, a solid knowledge of Linux (or Unix) and how it works, experience in programming in C (including pointers, enumeration, etc) and how to use some of the command-line development tools on Linux (or Unix) such as make.
This book is broken into major topic sections that begin with GLIB, the foundation library for development of Gnome applciations. GLIB provides many of the basic data and general purpose functions used by add-on Gnome libraries and you'll find it is used in all Gnome applications in some form.
From this foundation, the book takes you through a number of the major aspects of building Gnome solutions with very detailed chapters on GTK+, the Gnome Libraries and Glade, all that are used heavily in many desktop GUI applications developed for Gnome. These are sections you will want to spend a lot of time with to build a strong understanding of these key aspects of Gnome development.
Additional sections go into software development tools, GCONF and the Gnome Virtual File System (GnomeVFS), all areas that will be important as you continue to add to your Gnome programming knowledge.
Perhaps some of the most useful information in the book is in the later sections that provide for "Where to go from Here". This section details significant online resouces for additional learning and sharing of Gnome development information. From mailing lists to bugzilla to chats, this section covers how to get involved, get more information or get specific answers to Gnome development questions. You'll find yourself using this section frequently as you progress from Gnome novice to Gnome hacker.
The book's finally pages contain the appendices and a very complete index of the book's contents. The appendices contain information and guidance on obtaining the Gnome development sources and very useful sections on the stock items contained in GTK+ and Gnome.
If you will be doing devleopment of applications that will run under the Gnome environment, then this book will provide you with the tools to get started. It is a nice blend of reference and tutorial and will be useful to you for some time.
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