As I finish up w/ my C/C++ programming courses, I'm noticing that none of the school textbooks I have talk about GUI programming. Why might that be? Since nearly everything has a GUI facet, it seems like even a chapter or two would talk about it. Even if it's just to say how much harder it is.

I understand that most of the books are designed to instill good programming habits and the core knowledge for programming. But why relegate GUI to an after-school project?

That being said, does anyone have recommendations for good GUI programming tutorials, guides, books, etc? I have a dual boot XP/Linux box, with Visual Studio.NET on XP and KDevelop & Anjuta on Linux.

On a side note, what are your opinions on GUI vs. non-GUI programs?

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

crystallatice,

I always felt much the same way about GUI programming when I was in school. It always seemed harder and more interesting than the all the console programs. I only recently recieved the mind numbing realization that I was wrong. The way I tend to approach problems made the aspect of programming up a GUI rather intimidating to me, I tend to drill down to the smallest level possible in a subject in order to really feel confident I understand it. With most GUI stuff you have to have a measure of faith in the whichever sdk you are using. I hate having faith in my tools which is why I started off in Ada95 but didn't feel comfortable with some of the concepts, moved down to C, better but still a bit abstract,...anyways ended up knowing alot about diodes, but nothing about how to make a nice windows gui to display any of my equations etc...

Turns out most of work has been done for you and GUI programming is really more a matter of knowing you toolset (classes, functions etc.) really well. The academic stuff should prepare you to fill blanks.

I like petzold's books and his windows programming in C# is imho a great starting point. The main thing I like about it is he hand codes it rather than using visual studio, I always felt I was missing something important when I'm reading and see instructions like select the radio button from the list on the right etc... .

-sean

Thanks. I'll be sure to look up his books when I'm ready to move up to the "big time" :-)

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

I think it makes since they dont teach you GUI programming in most textbooks. The real power is behind the curtain and what a GUI user doesnt see would suprize them. I find it rather pleasing to create both GUI and Non-Gui interfaces when it comes to programming. I think reading up on it by yourself is the best thing to do anyways. Or who knows maybe the reason they dont teach GUI programming is because the people who wrote your text book have some disrepect for Mac....damn those old evil macs..

Hi. Based on some of the things that you are doing, this may not be the best suggestion, but I have really come to love the simplicity of FLTK. I just opened a sub-forum here about FLTK and I put a little opener about it.

FLTK is simple, it is adaptable, it is extensible and it is cross platform. In addition it adds the least amount of size to a program of any toolkit that I have ever used. I give a couple of links in the FLTK sub-forum if you want to learn more.

I agree with Sean when he mentions that GUI programming is not that overwhelming once you are familiar with the toolkit that you are using.

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Good stuff to know. I did see the new sub-forum and perused it. FLTK sounds very promising.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.