3. Organization of This Book

This book is divided into five parts:

  • Part I: Fundamentals of KDE Application Programming

  • Part II: Advanced KDE Widgets and UI Design Techniques

  • Part III: Application Interaction and Integration

  • Part IV: Developer Tools and Support

  • Part V: Appendixes

Each part contains several related chapters. After reading the first part, you should feel comfortable reading the other four parts in any order. This type of organization should allow you to create a working KDE application quickly and refine it or add more advanced KDE features to it at your own pace. For example, the techniques presented in Chapter 9, "Constructing a Responsive User Interface," are not needed to create a working application, but they are often needed to create a good, working application. Similarly, Chapter 15, "Multimedia," explains how to play sound and video with KDE. To most applications, sound is not essential, but it may be incorporated to give the user more feedback after the main application functions are implemented.

Part IV, "Developer Tools and Support," discusses tasks that you may wish to perform that are not directly required for application development, such as creating documentation, packaging your application for distribution, and using an Integrated Development Environment.