How to Use This Book

It's advisable to read at least Chapters 1 through 10 in order, but you can skip to other chapters if you need to complete a particular task. If you haven't installed wxWidgets before, you may want to look at Appendix A, "Installing wxWidgets," early on. MFC programmers will find it useful to read Appendix K, "Porting from MFC," as a point of reference.

Because this book is not a complete API reference, you'll find it useful to keep the wxWidgets reference manual open. The reference manual is available in a number of formats, including Windows HTML Help and PDF, and it should be in your wxWidgets distribution; if not, it can be downloaded from the wxWidgets web site. You can also refer to the many samples in the wxWidgets distribution to supplement the examples given in this book.

Note that the book is intended to be used in conjunction with wxWidgets 2.6 or later. The majority of the book will apply to earlier versions, but be aware that some functionality will be missing, and in a small number of cases, the behavior may be different. In particular, sizer behavior changed somewhat between 2.4 and 2.5. For details, please see the topic "Changes Since 2.4.x" in the wxWidgets reference manual.