wxWindows Book

About | Participants | Publication | Format | Style guide | Titles | Contents

About the wxWindows book

August 2000: the 'wxBook' project is getting going again, with a good response from potential contributors.

Robin Dunn has set up a wxBook mailing list.

The book will comprise 30 or so chapters dealing with progressively more advanced areas of wxWindows; each chapter will be as stand-alone as possible. 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. It 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:

  1. to allow users to become accomplished wxWindows developers rapidly;
  2. 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;
  3. to promote wxWindows to a wider audience;
  4. 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.

Participants

So far, the following people are interested in taking part in this project:

Others welcome! Please contact Julian Smart if you would like to contribute.

Publication

We will investigate publishers, especially O'Reilly. We will have to get together several sample chapters to convince a publisher that the many-author approach will work.

File format

Possible formats:

Style guide

We should write a style and formatting guide.

Book Titles

It would be good to include certain buzzwords such as Linux and open source, to get a publisher's (and the potential reader's) attention. The trick is to do that and not narrow the scope unduly.

Suggestions for the main book:

Other book titles that a publisher might be interested (but would be distinct projects):

Contents

The following is open to discussion.