I was under the impression that the book was for the current level of software.

The book turned out to be 18 years old.

It's hard to start from scratch when the book doesn't match what you're seeing.

Disappointed.

This is a very easy to read book for Qt beginners who knows C++. I strongly recommend this book to those who wants to learn basic understanding of QT without a lot of time (with some previous programming experiences).

I was looking for a book that can teach me write Qt in python (using pySide) in relatively short amount of time (less than 10 hours). I ordered 3 books on Amazon at one time, hoping that at least one of them was good...

The other two are:

- PySide GUI Application Development: This book is basically a junk. Despite the author's poor English writing skills(just as bad as my... now you have an idea), the book is way too short. If you jump the introduction part(i.e. how to install it, what is QT, etc. ) and the part the author copied and pasted from PySide Reference page, there are not much original stuff left.

- Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: If you have more time and want to have a very good understanding of QT in python, just buy this one... It uses PyQt though.

This is definitely the best introductory book available at present on Qt.

I must admit that, in general, I don't like the "Teach Yourself.." series from Sams, as I generally find that despite the good ansatz of "teach by doing" that the books tend to be 'thrown together' in too much of a hurry. Often they end up being little more than a collection of "click here, type this, and now you understand what happened" lectures, that lack good descriptions and explanations of why the examples work, and how one could change them to suit one's needs.

However there is a distinctive lack of Qt books on the market as of this writing: 3 in English: Solin (this book), Dalheimer (pub: O'Reilly edition 1) , and Ward (pub: Hewlett Packard) 1 in German: Leaner (pub: Addison Wesley, edition 2.. a thorough and helpful book too incidentally), and 1 in Japanese, with the "Official Qt Documentation" soon to be published. So I bought the book, albeit it with reservation, and started reading with scepticism.I was very pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong in this case.

The book is extremely well written with great attention to detail. The author is careful to cover lots of ground at a sufficient (but not pedantically nity gritty) level, with a self-contained and simple example for each of the many topics/Qt classes covered, making this an ideal introduction to and preparation for the (extensive and coherent) online Qt documentation. All other Qt books presently available have the serious failing that they do not have enough examples to illustrate the discussions in the book. Dalheimer has several versions of a single example and otherwise only code snippets (this is by the way the next best book in my opinion), and Ward has no complete examples worth mentioning (this book is highly overpriced, and not worth buying in my opinion. Borrow it from a library perhaps. It has a slightly outdated version of Qt (2.1) on an accompanying Cd which is something the other books don't have though.. perhaps a positive consideration for those with slow internet connections).

The author's email address is also printed in the book, and he was kind enough to answer promptly and send me the example source code, when I wrote to him. (Something the publisher's didn't...another black mark for Sams). The book also contains very helpful information on installing/setting up Qt , and even includes a chapter overviewing object orientated programming (Qt uses C++ as opposed to C. If you're completely new to C++ or object orientated concepts you should probably read an introductory book (Lafore's and Deitel's excellent works spring to mind) on that before trying to do any serious programming with Qt).

All in all this book is excellent and well worth buying. The only possible room for improvement/change in future editions would be the possible inclusion of a Cd with the example code and a current version of Qt, and sections covering the newer topics such Qt Designer and database programming (intended for inclusion in Qt 3.0), and the proposed Visual C++ integration Wizard (currently (version 2.2.4) implemented as a the seperately compilable qmsdev.dll ).

This is a good book for the last version of Qt but not great for the current one (as of 8/27/2002). It also has significant proofreading errors in it, implying that it was written in more or less the same amount of time that you're supposed to read it. However, it is an easy-to-read introduction to Qt programming and is nice for beginners (I recall a quote saying "of course, if you're a professional programmer you wouldn't have gotten this book" -- and I *am* a professional programmer). The O'Reilly book is a better choice if you already know programming; and if you don't know programming you probably shouldn't be starting with Qt. :)

If you are looking to learn this is not the book becuase you will quickly get frustrated with the errors that the book has. You cannot make mistakes in code! If you are looking for a companion to a primary book to better understand some things and work out the errors in this book then it is not a terrible purchase. I do not mind grammatical errors but when you are coding and learning to code it is a huge problem and dissapointment. It will help you through some things in QT.

As the author notices: "If you're a professional programmer (since you're reading this book I assume you're not...", this book is for rookies. It might be of some help if you really know nothing about modern programming, but if you do know at least something - don't waist your time and money. You'll find much more useful data online at trolltech site or some other places. In the best "teach yourself whatever in 24 hours" traditions, this book barely scratches the surface, living a lot of important information behind. For instance, there is not a single mentioning of events and hooks...:-(

I would've given it five stars, but I didn't like how it tried to fill up the 24 hours with how to use the widgets. Qt is pretty consistent (like any good library should be), and most of the methods work similarly enough that it's easy to figure out (like how to set the size). I would have like to have seen either more advanced topics or more indepth coverage of the advanced topics.

The book is lucid and follows much of the beginner's pages from the trolltech web site. However, it would have been nice to get a cdrom with both book examples and the GNU license-free version of the QT library.

Happy with book.