C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development Series)

This book is the model that all others should emulate. I haven't read every single page of it, nor do I expected to, nor do I expect to _have_ to. Long before I could read every word or try every example, I will _understand_ Qt and will be confident and expert enough to dive into it on my own.Here's what makes this book amazing: every single example works exactly as printed. Every single example includes a description, and every single description exactly matches and illuminates what the example code is doing. Every single chapter introduces an area of Qt to a sufficient depth to get real, production code up and running (in my case, in XP, Vista64, and MacOS).Will you still need to read the on-line docs? Sure. And when you do, you'll understand them better because of the introduction the book provided.I have well over 100 programming books accumulated over a 25 year academic and professional career, and this is among the best in accomplishing what it's supposed to. If you want to learn Qt, get it. 'nuff said.

While this text is now out of date in terms of the many important `minor' improvements and the IDE in the last ~2 years, it remains the very best place to start things I have found. It's advanced brother (also available here) covers few more pragmatic programming techniques, but is also a bit dated. Of course on top of all that is the announcement in 2011 by Nokia that they will be using a Windows approach for future phones which has many people questioning the Qt future itself. I presume you are reading this because you decided (in spite of that) to try Qt for a project of you own.This book is fairly dense but technically quite precise. I find myself re-reading the first ~four chapters to grasp the key terminology and I continue to find Qt more elegant than Mac or Windows who each have decades of baggage at this point. The authors know their stuff. Once you have the basics, the remaining 2/3rd cover the normal collection of programming tasks in a direct way. Qt is much more then just the GUI part. Unless your tasks are very diverse, you will likely only read what you need. The only `missing' content to my mind is a deeper review of debugging methods when things go amiss.If you are not moderately up on GUIs and the concepts of event driven programming in general, you might be overwhelmed a bit. But if you are, then you will not have your time wasted on such things. Rather, the text simply states how Qt does what it does with a bit more perspective on the design approach then the on-line documents have. That's was what I needed to fit it into my world view. It is not to my mind a restatement of the man pages as another reviewed stated, rather it is more like the style found in the 1984 classic "Inside Macintosh " manuals.

I chose this book being completely new to the Qt libraries and Linux as well, though Qt is not for just Linux and shows windows created under the various operating systems. I have not finished the book yet but I find it to do a good job in explaining a pretty complicated subject and can get up and creating nice apps pretty quickly. But being such a complicated subject, make sure to have the Qt documentation in your favorites list of your web browser and practice.

This book was my first introduction to Qt, and I've been using it for about two weeks now on a project. Other reviewers have argued that it doesn't give enough of a big-picture view. It is true that the book has many pages of annotated source code. I started off thinking the verbosity was daunting, but when I actually tried to start using Qt, I quickly appreciated all the little details in this book and the very complete index (the index is over 50 pages long). The Trolltech website is a good reference for putting everything in one place, but this book is great for stepping through an example in detail.One caveat: I've used other widget sets (Gtk, Tk) before with other languages, but have no previous experience with Qt, and not much experience with C++ (so I found the "Intro to C++" chapter for Qt programmers a helpful summary).

I realize its difficult to make examples that appeal to everybody. This book have some very good example ideas, but often lack in execution. Having spent the last few years with Java & C# it annoys me a lot that C++ programmers still continue to place a lot of initialization code into main(). In this book, eg. in chapter 5 the authors creates a custom plotter widget, that would be very useful as an example if it wasn't half made. Remember that Qt is OO and then you don't require the user to modify the class initialization in order to use the class. Every class needs to be able to stand on its own and initializations come in the constructor.Like a previous reviewer I would also like to see a Qt book that doesn't follow the exact same topic layout as the official manual, variety is always good.I'd like to end with saying that this is good book, however there is a bit too much information in some of the lengthy examples. If you manage to get through the chapters though, I'm sure you're well set up for a job as a Qt programmer.