Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Linux programming manuals

Author:Eric Kidd
Posted:3/5/1999; 11:29:41 AM
Topic:DHTML MTTF!
Msg #:3659 (In response to 3614)
Prev/Next:3658 / 3660

Here's what I use:

_Linux_Application_Development_, Addison Wesley. This doesn't cover GUI programming, but provides an excellent overview of the process model and other nitty gritty things. Highly recommended.

_The_Single_Unix_Specification_, The Open Group. You can order this from <http://www.opengroup.org/> or browse it online. It provides the "official" reference documentation for portable Unix programs, and about 98% of it applies to Linux. The Linux Standard Base project is working on the other 2%.

Anything ever published by O'Reilley. Really, you can't go wrong here. They document APIs, scripting languages, security and even Linux-specific features. A few of their manuals have problems, but the average quality is remarkably high.

As for GUI development, you have three real choices. Motif is mature, so you can find oodles of books and tutorials and application-building tools. Unfortunately, Motif is somewhat cumbersome to program, and its future is uncertain thanks to reorgs at the Open Group. Lots of books have been written about Motif; just pick one.

The KDE project has good documentation online; try browsing from <http://www.kde.org/>. If you like programming in C++, you'll find that the APIs are nice and TrollTech provides do or die support for about $1700/seat. It's a bargain--TrollTech is the same company which wrote a new Netscape front end in 5 days and got an Opera prototype working on Linux in three weeks. Scuttlebutt says they're a class act.

Gnome's documentation is still incomplete. I've been working from manuals-in-progress and sample code. (Because Gnome is an open source desktop, finding sample code is *not* a problem.) RedHat's hired a good tech writer to work on the online documentation, and no less than three books are in the pipeline. You can start by reading the material at <http://www.gtk.org/> and then hoping over to <http://www.gnome.org/>. You can write Gnome apps in several languages. C, C++, Objective C and Python are the best supported. For people who like scripting languages, check out PyGnome--Python's a sweet little language, and the Gnome bindings are fairly mature. To be honest, only early adopters will want to write Gnome software right now.

I do this stuff for a living, so don't hesitate to ask questions. I'm more than happy to answer Linux questions for the discussion group or individual developers. As a former Macintosh user, I owe some of you folks *big* favors. :-)

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:48:26 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.