Who This Book Is For

team bbl


This book is a guide to using wxWidgets, an open-source construction kit for writing sophisticated C++ applications targeting a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Pocket PC. With help from this book, a competent programmer can create multi-platform applications with confidence. Developers already familiar with wxWidgets should also find it useful for brushing up their knowledge.

This book is accessible to developers with a variety of experience and backgrounds. You may come from a Windows or Unix perspective; you may previously have experience in MFC, OWL, Win32, Mac OS, Motif, or console-mode Unix programming. Or perhaps you have come from a different career entirely and are looking for a way to get up to speed on multiple platforms. The book can't specifically cover the details of the C++ language, but it's common for people to successfully learn C++ and wxWidgets at the same time, and the straightforward nature of the wxWidgets API makes this process easier. The reader does not need to know more advanced C++ techniques like templates, streams, and exceptions. However, wxWidgets does not prevent you from using these techniques.

Managers will find the book useful in discovering what wxWidgets can do for them, particularly in Chapter 1, "Introduction." The combination of the book and the resources on the accompanying CD-ROM will give your staff all they need for getting started on cross-platform programming projects. You'll see how wxWidgets puts tools of tremendous power into your hands, with benefits that include:

  • Cost savings from writing code once that will compile on Windows, Unix, Mac OS X, and other platforms.

  • Customer satisfaction from delivering stable, fast, attractive applications with a native look and feel.

  • Increased productivity from the wide variety of classes that wxWidgets provides, both for creating great GUIs and for general application development.

  • Increased market share due to support for platforms you may not have previously considered, and the ability to internationalize your applications.

  • Support from a large, active wxWidgets community that answers questions helpfully and provides prompt bug fixing. The sample of third-party add-ons listed in Appendix E, "Third-Party Tools for wxWidgets," is evidence of a thriving ecosystem.

  • Access to the source for enhancement and trouble-shooting.

This is a guide to writing wxWidgets application with C++, but you can use a variety of other languages such as Python, Perl, a BASIC variant, Lua, Eiffel, JavaScript, Java, Ruby, Haskell, and C#. Some of these bindings are more advanced than others. For more information, please see Appendix E and the wxWidgets web site at http://www.wxwidgets.org.

We focus on three popular desktop platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux using GTK+, and Mac OS X. However, most of the book also applies to other platforms supported by wxWidgets. In particular, wxWidgets can be used with most Unix variants.

    team bbl



    Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets
    Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets
    ISBN: 0131473816
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 262

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