KDE Publishes a Book For Beginner Developers

jrepin writes "During a recent 5 day sprint, four KDE contributors planned and produced a handbook for beginning KDE developers. The guide is recommended for every new contributor to KDE development. It outlines technical aspects of contributing to KDE and is a valuable first point of contact for new developers. The guide offers insights into KDE from the developer's point of view, and explains how to check out existing code, modify it and submit patches. Currently the guide only focuses on the coding aspects of KDE. Contributors are welcome (encouraged) to expand the guide to cover other aspects of the KDE Community as well as enhance the existing content in the book. We are currently working on how to release subsequent versions."

Excellent initiative !

[Anonymous Coward]

Large frameworks can be daunting, this is a great way to start !

not for new devs

[X0563511]

This is not for "beginner developers" - this is for beginner kde developers - eg, developers who have not worked with KDE before.

Don't expect to learn from nothing, you should already know how to program before you tackle this.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I know how to use If Then statements and Goto. I will be fine.

Do you want the free help or not??

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[unixisc]

Does this require that one know QT programming in advance? C programming? I know bare programming concepts, but am weak @ most programming languages.

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[rohangarg]

For people starting with absolutely no Qt knowledge we link to the tutorials documented on the Qt site.

nitty gritty

[Anomalyst]

89 Pages $10, seems a bit pricey. Heres the PDF URL: http://en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/kde-guide/kde-guide.pdf [flossmanuals.net]

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[Builder]

I pay for value not length.

I'd happily pay twice as much for a new copy of the "C Programming Language " than I would for any of those "Learn C in 24 days" books despite it being half to a quarter of the length of those books.

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[X0563511]

Yea, but this is not that. It doesn't teach you everything, but it allows an already-knowledgeable programmer to jump in to the KDE project.

Not so much a copy of "C Programming Language" as it is a "Get Started with $FRAMEWORK" book.

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[slashgrim]

The web page view works better if you just want to take a look at the doc: http://en.flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/_all/ [flossmanuals.net]

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[fph il quozientatore]

The pdf you linked is 49 pages, not 89.

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[Anomalyst]

The dead tree listing indicated it was as 89.

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[rohangarg]

Ah, thats because the PDF is a A4 size document whereas the actual printed book is a smaller ( 5.5" x 8.5" ).

Way to bury the link

[dmearns]

Nice how they include the link for the "dead tree" version but the online version is much harder to find. Here it is http://en.flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/ [flossmanuals.net]

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[stoolpigeon]

They say it is available at FLOSS Manuals - and it's their right on the front page. I guess you could say it's harder but I wouldn't say it was hard to find. I downloaded the epub - loaded it up in calibre and mailed it to my kindle. They've done a lot to make this accessible to a wide number of people.

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[rohangarg]

Yep, Adam was a great guy to work with, they even got a Booki developer ( the platform on which the book is called booki ) to come and sit in our sessions so that we could hurl bugs at him and he fixed them in real time :D

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[dotancohen]

Nice how they include the link for the "dead tree" version but the online version is much harder to find. Here it is http://en.flossmanuals.net/kde-guide/ [flossmanuals.net]

Nice, thanks. Here is a direct link to the PDF:
en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/kde-guide/kde-guide.pdf [flossmanuals.net]

And EPUB:
en.flossmanuals.net/_booki/kde-guide/kde-guide.epub [flossmanuals.net]

How about a decent book on the API first?

[Viol8]

Instead of the utterly utterly hopeless api.kde.org

Feedback Welcome

[rohangarg]

Hi I'm Rohan Garg, one of the authors of the book. I'd like to mention that we would love feedback from people who are reading the book. How can we improve it? Don't like the artwork? Show us some awesome artwork and we'll ship it. Tell us what needs fixing and we'll work something out.

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[gbjbaanb]

I'd like to see how you created it - what tools and tips you have for making other large technical manuals like this.

then I guess you need to open source the, err, source so others can contribute directly, and make their own equivalents. I know we looked into various ways of controlling our manuals that currently exist on .doc format, (yeah tell me) so I'd be interested in that aspect.

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[rohangarg]

Hi gbjbaanb We used the Booki platform which does all the heavy lifting of generating the PDF/ePub/publishing to lulu. It's quite easy to use although we found the editor to be a bit quirky and requested that the developers improve it. You can create revisions of manual just like you would in real books, you can clone existing manuals and work on them although I've been told that a way to merge changes back into a manual is coming soon ( Just like you fork code, make changes and merge it back together ). Y

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[X0563511]

And since the KDE API and Qt change faster than I change my underwear...

Yea, that's a hard condition to meet. Glaciers move faster than your underwear gets changed.

Quanta, Kooka?

[JoeCommodore]

Any chapters on finishing porting long overdue KDE 3 apps in there?

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[rohangarg]

Nope, focuses on the current git workflow, IDE's and other stuff

How about a book on how to *use* KDE?

[swm]

How about a book on how to *use* KDE?

I was happily using KDE 3.x.
Then my distro went to KDE 4, and I couldn't make any sense out of it.
I finally gave up and switched to Gnome.

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[TheNinjaroach]

Then my distro went to KDE 4, and I couldn't make any sense out of it.

Yeah, but have you tried it recently? Too many distros jumped the gun on KDE4 and started using it a few releases before it was ready as a viable replacement to KDE3.

I know that I was in the same boat as you for awhile, but after a few more releases I now find KDE4 to be better than 3 in almost every way.

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[rohangarg]

Feel free to start one on http://booki.flossmanuals.net/ [flossmanuals.net] . The platform is quite good. I did think of starting such a project, but I just don't have the time to write/maitain such a book.