Programming with Qt, 2nd Edition

Preface

A Productive Weekend

A few years ago, someone emailed me on a Friday. He wanted to start a small project, but did not really have the resources for it. He outlined the requirements and asked how long it would take me.

The next Monday, he phoned to ask if I thought the project was feasible and how much time I would need. I said that I already had a working prototype. I had hacked it together in a few hours the day before—and because I had used Qt, I had still found enough time to play outside with my son. Needless to say, I got the contract. Does this sound too good to be true? Well, I admit, I lied a bit. It was raining cats and dogs that Sunday and we had to play inside. But the rest is true.

The Qt class library makes it easy to write applications that are visually attractive, fast, and ready to run on Windows, Unix, MacOS X, and (Linux-based) embedded systems in a very short time. Had I used Motif, gtk, or another toolkit for this task, I might not have managed it in such a short time. If I had to port my program to Windows, the number of choices would have been even smaller, and for embedded systems there are hardly any alternatives.

Until the first edition of this book, there was not much Qt documentation for beginners. The package itself includes a tutorial, but leaves out a lot. There are other example programs, but often you have to search through several files to find what you are looking for and sometimes you don’t find it at all. Some people think it’s hard to get ...