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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:
- to allow users to become accomplished wxWindows developers rapidly;
- 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;
- to promote wxWindows to a wider audience;
- 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.
So far, the following people are interested in taking part in this project:
- Tom Ryan, SciTech Software.
- Robin Dunn. Chapter on wxPython.
- Matt Heck, SurveyorCorp Inc.
- a case study of how and why we've used wxWindows at Surveyor Corp., and
how it's worked out so far;
- an appendix something similar about how to use wxLIVID for video capture and display;
- proofreading
- Julian Smart.
- Vadim Zeitlin.
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.
- 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)
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.
This is open to suggestion.
Last year, Mike Lorenz of VisionX
suggested this
tutorial outline, which could
be a good starting point.