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Foundations of PyGTK Development: GUI Creation with Python Authors: Ashley, W. David, Krause, Andrew Website: https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484241783 Price: 26.99 Euro
From the website: Learn how to develop portable GUI programs to run on multiple operating systems. Revised and updated from the popular original, with a full set of new examples in Python and using PyGTK, this book provides all the information you'll need to write easy or complex GUI applications, offering one source of knowledge and best practices for user interface creation.
Whilst trying to figure out Glade 3.22, I saw this book mentioned as the authority on using it, so naturally I made a plan to get my hands on it. I could not wait to wade into this sea of information, or at least get my toes wet. You see, I found glade to be confusing at best, compared to other visual editors that are easy to use, like Lazarus.
The first chapter gives us info about GTK 2 and 3, but feels like ‘faffing’ around. I get the impression the authors are people set in their ways (I almost said fuddie-duddies!) who now have to remember what it was like when they learned something. Stuff is thrown out there without context given. Okay, maybe it’s just me, let’s move on. The next chapter we are told that The Gtk.Application and Gtk.ApplicationWindow classes are the foundations of the book and will be explained in detail. Good. This is the first line: “Gtk.Application is the base class of a GTK application. Its primary purpose is to separate your program from Python main function, which is a Python implementation detail.” - Immediately it feels like a book I am not going to finish. I am definitely not the intended audience (even though I feel I am ‘foundations -worthy.) The book does not read easy or flow nicely for one to understand. I finished the rest of the chapter easily enough. On to chapter three. “Some simple GTK applications”. Instead of simple applications, we get Hello World… As someone with no experience in GTK I was led to believe in the beginning that I did not need to know anything, but it just becomes clearer to me this book is actually aimed at someone with years of GTK 2 experience making their way to GTK3. Throwing in “Hello World” does not a beginner make.
The “extending the hello world application” part was quite interesting – with a totally uninteresting base. Although the “application” is simple and I want to learn badly, there is just no context for me. Here is an explanation:
“window.set_transient_for(parent) You can set the icon that appears in the taskbar and title bar of the window by calling window.set_icon_from_file(). The size of the icon does not matter, because it is resized when the desired size is known. This allows the scaled icon to have best quality.”
This reads more like a ‘manpage’ and less like a book. Chewing on dry cardboard will keep my attention longer. Even though I desperately want to learn this, the style, the boring examples and numbing slog, made me end it after chapter three. I am not a sadist and am not going to torture myself. For a “Foundations” book, it’s a zero on a report card for me. Constant references to GTK2 the whole time also meant nothing to me, it’s supposed to be a ‘teach me’, not ‘reference me’, book.
I am so wasted by the end of chapter three, I could not even be bothered to find out who the authors are. (Sorry, but I am totally NAAFI now.)
I am sorry to say, but this feels like lazy writing. It feels like there was no plan to “teach”, but more to flesh out manpages. At 600 bucks locally (NAD, or $42 USD), it is very expensive and I will not recommend it to anyone.
This book gets one star.