Introduction

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) project is a worldwide collaboration of hundreds of software engineers and hobbyists who are working to create a free, modern desktop interface with a consistent graphical user interface (GUI) style across applications. The desktop is network transparent, meaning that remote and local files can all be viewed, edited, and managed in the same way; it has online hypertext help and features an integrated, full-featured Web browser. The purpose of this book is to teach you how to take advantage of all that the KDE libraries have to offer when you write your own applications.

1. Prerequisites

The authors of this book assume that you already know C++ at the beginner level or better. Some familiarity with event-driven GUI programming would be beneficial, although it is not necessary. If you are new to UNIX-style operating systems (such as Linux), you should probably have a book about them on hand. You will need to know enough about UNIX to understand how to compile and install software using the make utility (although some instructions are provided).