In my opinion, the authors of this book used an inappropriate technique for explaining Qt concepts: they repeatedly show long excerpts of source code (C++ with Qt classes and macros) and then go through the source code line by line explaining what we are seeing. It's like exploring an art museum with a magnifying glass held 2 inches away from the paintings. You never get the big picture, you can never stand back and see Qt from the top down, you can never get your arms around it. Just these endless examples with fantastically detailed explanations in which absolutely critical concepts are buried deep in the text, casually mentioned in passing, and given no more space or emphasis than the unimportant concepts.

This technique didn't work at all for me. I got through the first 50 pages or so and was exhausted because I had to spend so much time combing through the code examples and the text, reading and re-reading and studying it. And rather than use simple examples that would spotlight and highlight new key concepts, the authors veer off into fairly advanced things way too early (like shape-changing dialogs on page 31 and dynamic dialogs on page 38) while the reader is still trying to digest the basic concepts like QObject and slots and signals.

Unfortunately, the two other Qt books out there and the Trolltech tutorial aren't much better. They all have this nutty idea that you can teach Qt to anyone if you just hang source code like wallpaper everywhere and then explain it line by line. The authors of this book obviously spent a lot of time on this book, and I don't enjoy criticizing their work, but the book would have been ten times better if the authors had prefaced each chapter with an introductory discussion of key concepts and not forced the readers themselves to dig the details out of dense source code.

So I got to page 51 and gave up... then the book turned into a doorstop, sadly. It might be useful to a Qt expert who is trying to refresh his or her knowledge of Qt, but as a tutorial to new students of Qt the book is unsuccessful.

Trolltech recommends this book as the best way to get started learning QT4. I cannot imagine why. Perhaps they think it is the best of a bad lot.

You don't walk away from this book with any kind of feel for the classes or widgets. No big surprise really, because the book constantly refers you to the APIs.

When it actually endeavours to explain something, the content is usually out of context and based on some class/idea that has not been presented yet (or at all).

Basically, these guys need to collect their thoughts a little bit better and present them more coherently. I also think the book needs a couple hundred more pages to drill down into some of the classes, so that the reader actually gets a feel for them. I don't know why I would want to pay for a book that just refers me to APIs.

I always feel let down when I fork out cash for a dud book. I guess self-education is like any investment; sometimes you just lose on your investment.

It is obvious that the authors do know their topic (Qt4 programming).
It is much less obvious that they master the technique to write a good programming book!

This book has lost of un-necessary verbiage but lack a clear sense of structure. The differences between the platforms (for me Windows/Linux) are poorly documented... so trial and error has been the mode to get simple things done.

Another comment would be the poor formatting of the examples (position of curly brackets etc...) making the example a lot less readable that their should be.

Conclusions:
1) I have not yet picked up another book, but this one was not my best purchase! I will probably at the usually good O'Reilly Books.

2) Usually Prentice Hall is a great editor, but this book may have been "rushed out" before it was ready. Suggest some prudence there, or possibly sell this book as a "Alpha Release" book?

The fact that this is the ONLY official best-practice guide to QT 4 programming makes it a 'must have' for any college-level or specialty computer library serious about catering to C++ programmers. QT4 enables developers to build stronger C++ applications that run on systems from Linux to Windows without source code changes, and this revised, expanded documentary includes the latest, proven solutions for all kind of GUI development asks. This update includes new coverage of databases, XML and other programming concerns. A 'must' reference for serious, advanced programmers and computer libraries.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Qt continues to evolve. This book gives a comprehensive description of the latest major release, 4. Why does Qt even exist? Basically because now any object oriented language that seeks broad usage needs an extensive widget library for the making of graphical programs. Java and C# are the prime examples. But of course C++ predates these by many years, and the intrinsic definitions of the C++ standards have no widgets. So Qt is offered as the [mostly] graphical extension of C++. Akin to how the Standard Template Library has data structures that extend the purely computational aspects.

In some ways, the book is pretty simple if you've coded in any other graphical language. The concepts are the same. An attraction of Qt is how quickly you can write code to put up windows with several widgets, and attaching callbacks to button widgets for functionality.

Qt also has important classes dealing with other issues. Like reading and writing to the filesystem or SQL database. And multithreading. Or parsing XML. These sections of the book can be harder to assimilate. With the graphical classes, writing test code and debugging can be easy, since the graphics gives you a tight visual feedback loop. But for [say] debugging TCP client server applications, low level bugs can be very obscure to hunt down.