About |
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Contents
Discussions have been taking place on the wxwin-developers list
about collaboratively writing a wxWindows book. The book will
not include the API reference, though this could be a
separate project. The book will be accompanied by a CD-ROM with
wxWindows and its documentation. The book will initially be
available on-line, and when enough is done we will look for a
publisher.
There will also be a separate small booklet which can easily be printed
out and which gives an overview of wxWindows facilities by taking
the reader through a single worked example. Guillermo Rodriguez
Garcia has volunteered to write this, and will use his Life!
demo to illustrate it.
Goals for the book:
- to allow users to become accomplished wxWindows developers rapidly;
- to be useful over a longer period than just the first few weeks, since
there are a lot of complex areas to address and not all features will be
used up-front in a project;
- to promote wxWindows to a wider audience;
- to make at least some money for the authors.
Audience: beginners + experienced wxWindows users, but with reasonable C++
knowledge.
It is suggested that any financial return from the book be allocated on a points system,
with a predefined number of points for chapters, indexing, editing, proof-reading etc.
So far, the following people are interested in taking part in this project:
We should have a substantial chunk of wxBook done before we approach a publisher,
because with the risks of multiple author
- Chapter on converting from MFC. (Julian Smart)
- A chapter on why some inconsistencies are almost always going to show up in a
multiplatform toolkit, how to avoid them, how to deal with when you have
no choice, and (if wxBook explains the internals or philosophy of
wxWindows at all) how wxWindows attempts to minimize the number we
encounter. (Matt Heck)
- Creating the shortest possible path to writing "Hello World" from scratch in wxWindows. (Matt Heck)
- How will royalties for subsequent editions be shared out? (Tom Ryan)
- "My personal feeling is that this project will wind up being developed
by a small team, led by an editor that will wind up doing about half
of the total amount of work." (Tom Ryan)
This depends partly on the publisher, but one possibility is to target Word but have
submissions in a number of formats including Latex. We should eventually write a style
and formatting guide.
This is open to suggestion.
Last year, Mike Lorenz of VisionX
suggested this
tutorial outline, which could
be a good starting point.