unix

I was given a few weeks to port several applications from other windowing systems to Qt. I had never used Qt before.

This book, along with the Qt Assistant online documentation, were all I needed. I was astonished at how relevant almost every page of this book was to my tasks.

The examples of displaying data in a table, employing double-buffered graphics, parsing and creating XML, adding OpenGL, multithreading, using sockets, creating custom events, and accessing a database were all almost copy-and-pasted into my final applications. Even the esoteric information on selecting an object from an OpenGL widget was useful.

Maybe my needs were just particularly well covered by the material in this book, but it's more likely that the authors have carefully chosen a wide range of examples that prove to be extremely useful in real-world applications.

I found myself pretty disappointed with this book contents. From book reviews I read, I expected clean, concise and self-contained explanation of Qt features. The book is indeed covering most of Qt features, but presentation style is - well, confusing. Namely, for the most parts, book chapters are explanations of rather large code fragments, that often have nothing to do with Qt. Reader is thus forced to take non-insignificant effort to understand these parts of code (that are in turn often incomplete, so it is necessary to look-up full source code from CD all the time), so understanding of Qt-specific topics has necessary to be blurred with this. For example, immediately after showing hello-world like program in first chapter, authors are jumping into development of full-blown Excell-like application in next three chapters. While it is indeed still toy application, it is not particularly funny to follow more than 1000 lines of code in this place (much more appropriate would be to have alike examples in later parts of book, once when most of Qt features covered with small and simple examples, or even as appendices). Things are getting worse toward end of book, with full sections of code completely irrelevant to topic. For example, at the end of chapter eight, an example of using OpenGL along with Qt is presented and this application implements picking support that is considered advanced topic even by OpenGL texts. This fragment of code is completely unnecessary, since authors already demonstrated usage of Qt mouse events for interaction with scene when they added support for rotating scene using mouse click-and-drag. Yet, the fragment is there and "explanation" of this code boils down to "you know, it's a bit complicated". Now, luckily I knew OpenGL so I was able to understand this code, but on many other places I had lots of problems to track the code (when reading a book, I really don't like to take any part of sample code for granted, even if I advised in text to do so, because I always have a feeling that I don't understand something later because of this) that really has nothing to do with my learning of Qt. To put it simply, this text is suffering from authors "look how smart our programs are" attitude and this is pity, because it could be really great text only if they opted for more step-by-step approach, as demonstrated regarding GUI programming by Petzold's Programming Windows series (and I hate to state this, I'm UNIX programmer). Still, if one is experienced C++ programmer and already had a contact with Qt (Qt tutorials are far from being perfect, but still good introduction to the world of Qt programming), then he could definitely benefit from this book. Further, as some of reviewers already stated, accompanying CD is invaluable resource because of non-commercial version of Qt 3 for Windows supplied, so overall value for money for this book is good.

The only way to get the most up to date version of QT Non-Commercial for Windows is to buy this book. That is absolutely shameful. That is the only reason why most people would buy this book. If you want to develop free, open source applications that work on any platform - then you have to pay Trolltech if you want to use the newest version of QT according to their license. I understand their motivations (getting people to migrate to Linux, and making more profit for themselves), but it just means people are migrating to wxwidgets, gtk+, java, and .NET instead.