Qt 4 Cookbook - Preface

If you take any activity, any art,

any discipline, any skill,

take it and push it as far as it will go,

push it beyond where it has ever been before,

push it to the wildest edge of edges,

then you force it into the realm of magic.
Tom Robbins (1936), American author

We must be grateful to God

that He created the world in such a way

that everything simple is true

and everything complicated is untrue.

Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722–1794),

Ukrainian philosopher, poet, and composer

When I want to read a novel, I write one.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881),

1st Earl of Beaconsfield,

British politician, novelist, and essayist

Qt (pronounced ‘cute’) is a cross-platform application framework. Using Qt, you can develop applications for Microsoft Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, Mac OS X, Windows CE, Embedded Linux, and Symbian OS. 

Qt is produced by the Norwegian company Qt Software (formerly known as Trolltech and as Quasar Technologies), a wholly owned subsidiary of Nokia. Qt is implemented in C++, and provides official support for development in either C++ or Java programming languages. Community bindings exist for several other languages, including C#, Ada, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python.

Qt provides a rich set of standard widgets that can be used to create GUI (graphical user interface) for applications. Besides GUI framework Qt also includes libraries for data structures manipulation, file and process handling, multi-threading, XML processing, network programming, ActiveX support, OpenGL integration, database access and others. Development of Qt application is supported by visual designer (Qt Designer), a set of internationalization tools (Qt Linguist) and comprehensive documentation (Qt Assistant).

Qt is the de facto standard C++ framework for high performance cross-platform software development. Qt is used in popular software such as Skype, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Lucasfilm and by more than 5000 customers worldwide.

Although Qt is by essence a commercial product, an open source (GPL) edition can be downloaded from www.trolltech.com and used in open source software development.

This book offers a definitive collection of solutions and examples that may be useful for all who are interested in Qt. The author hopes that this book will help you understand Qt and apply it effectively.