X-Git-Url: https://git.saurik.com/wxWidgets.git/blobdiff_plain/c7527e3f2178b3a527c50ffda6bb059f8ff8acce..917afc7b81c6f806ea3d50b455f7c4e320ecd68f:/docs/html/wxbook.htm diff --git a/docs/html/wxbook.htm b/docs/html/wxbook.htm index c40507fe9a..01c3c737bf 100644 --- a/docs/html/wxbook.htm +++ b/docs/html/wxbook.htm @@ -8,10 +8,10 @@ - +

About the wxWindows book

-Discussions have been taking place on the wxwin-developers list about -collaboratively writing a wxWindows book. The concensus is to write a tutorial -book for people with reasonable C++ experience, with the possibility of including the API reference either in a very compact -form at the back of the book, or as a separate volume. The book would almost certainly -contain a CD-ROM with wxWindows and its documentation. It would probably be available -for free on-line, publisher permitting.

+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:

@@ -59,15 +76,44 @@ 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:

Julian Smart - +editor and coordinator of the project; introductory chapter, some other +chapters. +
Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia - Separate tutorial booklet; +communication classes (wxSocket, wxXXXServer, some protocol stuff); timing and timers. +
Robin Dunn - wxPython chapter. + +
Vadim Zeitlin - drag and drop, several other chapters. +
Robert Roebling - not known. +
Vaclav Slavik - wxHTML section. +
George Tasker - database chapter. +
Carlos Moreno - wxImage, wxBitmap. +
Shiv Shankar Ramakrishnan - wxWindows advocacy, convincing your manager, +container classes and strings, comparison with STL +
Markus Neifer - user-defined events. + + + + +

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

Publication

+We wll 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: + +

Word +
Abiword: possibly not developed enough yet, but +it can output Latex which would make conversion to Tex2RTF format quite simple +
Latex: favoured format so far. The LyX near-WYSIWYG word processor (Unix only) can output Latex. +See also NTTex +which uses EMACS as an editor. For an introduction to Latex, see here. +A free TeX for Windows: see MikTex. More TeX info: TUG. +
XML: hard to read/write +
SGML: ditto +
DocBook: don't have any information about this, but Linux Admin Made Easy +uses it. +
Structured text - +plain text with indentation and other elements to provide structure. The tools seem under-developed and there +doesn't seem to be a simple way of getting them without using the CVS Zope archive. +
troff - favoured by O'Reilly +

+ +

Text format

Style guide

-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.

+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:

+ +

Multiplatform GUI development with wxWindows +
wxWindows: an open source multiplatform toolkit +
wxWindows: GUI development for Linux and other platforms +

+ +

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

+ +

Writing GTK+ Application Using wxWindows +
Migrating MFC Apps to Linux Using wxWindows +

+ +

-This is open to suggestion.

+The following is open to discussion.

-Last year, Mike Lorenz of VisionX -suggested this -tutorial outline, which could -be a good starting point.

Chapter 01: Introduction to wxWindows: history, advocacy, future developments +
Chapter 02: Installing wxWindows (and what tools to use) +
Chapter 03: C++ and wxWindows. Summarises the sorts of constructs used/not used, plus wxString class, +some conventions. Vadim suggests putting it in 1st chapter but I think it deserves a chapter of its own. +
Chapter 04: Getting started: Hello World. Introduces app class, frames, menus, status bar, message box +
Chapter 05: Basic event handling +
Chapter 06: Frames and menubars. The components of a frame, menubars. +
Chapter 07: Toolbars and status bars +
Chapter 08: Basic controls +
Chapter 09: Common dialogs +
Chapter 10: Custom dialogs and resources (XML + WXR) +
Chapter 11: Drawing on device contexts +
Chapter 12: Handling input (mouse, keyboard, joystick) +
Chapter 14: Sizers +
Chapter 15: Images and bitmaps +
Chapter 16: Clipboard and drag and drop +
Chapter 17: Advanced controls (list,tree,notebook,splitter,wxWizard,wxCalCtrl...) +
Chapter 18: Document/view classes +
Chapter 19: Scrolling +
Chapter 20: MDI +
Chapter 21: Printing +
Chapter 22: Providing help in your applications +
Chapter 23: Strings and internationalization +
Chapter 24: Collection and container classes +
Chapter 25: Memory management and debugging (including wxLog) +
Chapter 26: Run-time class information +
Chapter 27: Advanced event handling (user-defined events, ...) +
Chapter 28: Communication classes, including wxSocket +
Chapter 29: Database classes +
Chapter 30: File and stream classes +
Chapter 31: Configuration classes +
Chapter 32: Time, timers and idle processing +
Chapter 33: Writing multithreading applications +
Chapter 34: Perfecting your UI (Adapting to system settings, accelerators, ...) +
Chapter 35: Platform-specific programming (metafiles, OLE automation, taskbar, ...) +
Chapter 36: Using wxHTML +
Chapter 37: Using wxPython +
Chapter 38: wxBase? +
Appendix: Comparison with other toolkits: MFC, Qt etc. +

- +	+ wxWindows Book