Need a good and recent book on GLib/GTK+

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

Hi,

In the article "Shifting toward Qt":
http://lwn.net/Articles/607563/

One of the mentioned problems is the GTK+ documentation. I don't agree
with that, I think the API is well documented. But what is really
missing is a good and recent book, for an introduction to how to write a
GLib/GTK+ application.

The GGAD book, by Havoc Pennington, was really good:
http://ometer.com/books.html
http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=1811

It is an "advanced internals"/"conceptual understanding" kind of book,
which is needed for those wanting to clearly understand what they are
doing when programming, which will result to better software quality.

With such a book, there is a single source of useful information to get
started as a developer. Currently the tutorials and documentation are
scattered, that's why I've written a small guide:
https://wiki.gnome.org/S%C3%A9bastienWilmet/DevGettingStarted

But clearly a book would be a better solution.

GTK+ 3 is currently a bit unstable. But GLib, GObject and GIO are stable
enough to write a book. For GTK+, the version 4 will normally be as
stable as GTK+ 2.

The book should have a free license (e.g. Creative Commons) and be
available on the web. It should be written by an experienced developer,
ideally a GLib/GTK+ maintainer.

There is no better way to advertise the GNOME development platform, to
have more applications written in GTK+, and indirectly more GNOME
developers.

What do you think?

Sébastien