> Is there a good book on GTK+ 2.0?
>
>I am assuming that a GTK 1.2 book isn't going to
> help me that much with 2.0.
Hi,
Since no one else has responded, I thought that I would give it a try (also
being a newbie). I apologize in advance for the lengthy reply.
1) In my opinion, the books written for GTK+-1.2 are still a good place to
start, given the lack of books for -2.0. Even though many things changed
with -2.0, the basics are still the same. While there is obviously a lot of
duplication in the various books. I find that the repetition from studying
several books helped to drive the basic points home. In addition, each book
covered things not covered in other books, and this was very helpful. I
picked up numerous tips in this way.
2) There are obviously a lot of places where deprecated functions are used in
the examples, and numerous places where old functions/structure elements are
no longer valid. I had to manually convert some of this code in the examples
that I wanted to study. It would be great if someone has already done this
for the examples in the books - especially the areas dealing with Pango,
fonts, colors, etc.
3) Learning GTK+ is a lot like looking at a fractal - every time that you
focus on a single small area, you find out that there is a very large and
complicated world underneath the surface. Focus on a small area of that new
world and the same thing happens. Those who have been working with GTK+ for
a long time make GTK+ seem easy, but there are so many features and options
that it requires a lot of time and effort to learn.
4) There IS a lot of on-line documentation available, but it took a long time
to find it and to learn to use it. If you installed your gtk source in:
"/usr/src/gtk/gtk+-2.2.2"
and installed gtk+ in the default "/usr/local" directory, then add the
following bookmarks to your browser: (link/description)
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/gtk/index.html
The GTK+ Reference Manual
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/gdk/index.html
The GDK Reference Manual
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/gobject/index.html
The GObject Reference Manual
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/glib/index.html
The GLib Reference Manual
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/pango/index.html
The Pango Reference Manual
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/gdk-pixbuf/index.html
The gdk-pixbuf Library
file:/usr/local/share/gtk-doc/html/atk/atk.html
The ATK Library
file:/usr/src/gtk/gtk+-2.2.2/docs/tutorial/html/book1.html
The GTK+ Tutorial
file:/usr/src/gtk/gtk+-2.2.2/docs/faq/html/book1.html
GTK+ FAQ
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/porting/index.html
Porting from GTK+-1.2 to GTK+-2.0
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/
GTK archives
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-app-devel-list/
GTK App-Devel Archives
5) I also find the .html file available at
:http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-app-devel-list/2003-August/msg00106.html
to be very helpful when searching for a topic when I don't know where the
topic is defined (it could be in any of 350 .html files linked to the first 7
files listed above).
6) Go to the "/usr/src/gtk" directory (or wherever you have your source files)
and enter:
find . -name "*.[ch]" -print > taglist
ctags -L taglist
rm taglist
This creates a rather large (approx 4M) "tags" file in the current directory
containing a list of all of the functions and definitions declared in all of
the GTK+, Pango, Glib, etc. source files. If you need to look at the source
code for (say) "gtk_notebook_set_show_tabs", go back to the "/usr/src/gtk"
directory and enter:
vi -t gtk_notebook_set_show_tabs
This will open the appropriate source file and move the cursor to the start of
the desired function/definition. (This information is from the "Gnome/GTK+
Programming Bible", page 16) If there is a way to do this as a link from a
.html file, I would appreciate it if someone would give an example.
7) There are a number of example programs in the
"/usr/src/gtk/gtk+-2.2.2/examples"
directory. What I specifically like about these examples is that they are
compiled with options such as:
-DG_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
-DGDK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
-DGDK_PIXBUF_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
-DGTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
so that there should not be any deprecated code in the examples.
8) There are additional examples in the
"/usr/src/gtk/gtk+-2.2.2/tests"
directory. These programs are compiled when gtk+ is compiled, so you have to
install them somewhere else before doing a "make clean". Be sure to copy the
hidden ".libs" directory along with the visible files. However some of these
files include statements such as:
#undef GTK_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
#define GTK_ENABLE_BROKEN
which indicates that they contain deprecated and broken code (in fact I copied
these statements to get some of the 1.2 code from the books to compile)..
9) There is also a "gtk-demo" program that is installed with gtk+ (the source
can be displayed as part of the program). I don't know if this program uses
any deprecated code.
I hope that this shortens your learning curve. If anyone has additional hints
on navigating the on-line documentation, I would appreciate hearing their
tips.
Dave Smith
_______________________________________________
gtk-list@xxxxxxxxx
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-list
