wxWindows Book

About | Participants | Publication | Suggestions | Format | Contents

### 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.

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:

- Bil Simser. Bil would like to coordinate the book. He's currently writing a book for WordWare Publishing (about his CDX library) and also has contacts at Sams and the Waite Group. Bil is writing wxBuilder, an IDE for wxWindows.
- Tom Ryan, SciTech Software.
- Robin Dunn. Chapter on wxPython.
- Matt Heck, SurveyorCorp Inc.
  1. a case study of how and why we've used wxWindows at Surveyor Corp., and how it's worked out so far;
  2. an appendix something similar about how to use wxLIVID for video capture and display;
  3. proofreading
- Julian Smart.
- Vadim Zeitlin.
- Vaclav Slavik. wxHTML section
- Stefan Csomor. the sequence of events i.e. which action provokes which event sequence, this is implicit for the use on MSW, but very important for other systems; and porting to new platforms
- Karsten Ballueder. short tutorials on some useful GNU tools, like autoconf/configure/make, programming strategies, etc.

### Publication

Tom Ryan originally wrote:

    Hi Guys,

    I just wanted to let you know that I have spoken with officials here
    at California State University, Chico and they are potentially
    interested in publishing a book on wxWindows!  A wxWindows
    book would give wxWindows a great deal of exposure.

    These discussions came out of the fact that CSUC wanted to
    switch from MFC to wxWindows in their GUI programming classes,
    but there was not a book available for students to work with.

    I was thinking that the first edition could be primarily the reference
    documentation combined with a basic wxTutorial and examples. In
    this case, it would be fairly straightforward to get something out
    initially and then we could take it from there.

Ben Allfree has also expressed an interest in publishing a wxWindows book, and distributing it via Amazon. Ben was thinking in terms of a quickie job using the existing reference manual.

Another publishing name to think of is O'Reilly. They would probably give us a lot of guidance for style, formatting, etc.

Roald Ribe writes: "Thinking in Java is published both as a PDF for internet (by the author) and in print by Prentice Hall."

### Suggestions and comments

- Chapter on converting from MFC. (Julian Smart)
- A chapter on why some inconsistencies are almost always going to show up in a multiplatform toolkit, how to avoid them, how to deal with when you have no choice, and (if wxBook explains the internals or philosophy of wxWindows at all) how wxWindows attempts to minimize the number we encounter. (Matt Heck)
- Creating the shortest possible path to writing "Hello World" from scratch in wxWindows. (Matt Heck)
- How will royalties for subsequent editions be shared out? (Tom Ryan)
- "My personal feeling is that this project will wind up being developed by a small team, led by an editor that will wind up doing about half of the total amount of work." (Tom Ryan)

### Text format

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.

### Contents

This is open to suggestion.

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