Re: tutorial for a GTK newbie

["Manish Chakravarty" <manishchakravarty yahoo co in>]

Gus Koppel wrote
> > If your just starting and want to learn how things work then avoid
> > tools that automatically do things for you like Glade.
> > Do all the work manually with source thats written by hand.
>
> I contradict. In my opinion using Glade is a good way to properly learn
> how to program GUIs in GTK+.
>
> I would recommend the following steps:
>
> 1. get basic understanding of how GTK+ works, by reading tutorials and
>    getting an overview over widget classes and their capabilities.
>
> 2. use Glade to play with GTK+ features. Create windows and populate
>    them with widgets of all sorts, change their attributes, get a
>    feeling for the various layout features etc.
>
> 3. let Glade create C source code of the UI you were designing. Study
>    the resulting src/*.c files. There you can get a good idea about
>    what functions are called for which widgets, how attributes and
>    layouts are set / created and in which order this is done.
>
> > Don't copy/paste code from tutorials (yes there are a few) type it
> > manually.
>
> This depends on the personal learning skills in general. Some people
> like or need to (re)type presented source code to learn or understand
> things. Others can do without it, by just thoroughly studying it.
>
> Once the way GTK+ UIs get built by function calls is understood, it's up
> to you whether you like to keep developing this way or make use of
> libglade and XML "sources".
>
> The libglade way involves a bit more overhead, requires an additional
> library at runtime and makes your UI easily changeable by everyone
> (which is not always desired).
>
> On the other hand, letting Glade build the C source provides least
> overhead, there's no need for a libglade installation, resource
> consumption is (slightly) lower and the UI can't be modified unless the
> application source is provided.
thanx for the help... guess i will learn python and then proceed to do it
with pyGTK
Reagards
manish