An Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4 Reviewed

Three Books in One : C++, Design Patterns and Qt

I found the background to this book quite interesting. The authors Paul and Alan Ezust are father and son who have between them 40 years of teaching and programming experience. Paul Ezust holds the position of chair of the Suffolk University Department of Mathematics (and Computer Science). Bucking the ten year old trend of universities teaching Java, Suffolk University still teaches C++.

The book's scope is ambitious. In 600 pages it aims to teach C++ to those with programming experience in another language, then to introduce them to Design Patterns and also how to develop applications using the Qt 4 framework. Qt is Trolltech's application framework for creating multi platform applications and can be licensed for commercial or GPL'd Open Source development. I was surprised to find out that it's more popular for development on Windows than Linux, accordinging to Trolltech. That said this is a book that will probably appeal more to those wanting to develop applications using Qt for Linux or other flavors of UNIX. You will need to look elsewhere to fill in the gaps needed to develop for Windows using Qt.

In the first seven chapters focus is on C++ development and language features and it introduces the basic Qt 4 functionality. By necessity there is a lot of material in there and it rattles along at a pretty fast pace. The emphasis is on intoducing what is needed for Qt development rather than cover all aspects of C++. It's comprehensive in scope, I'd estimate perhaps 70-75% of C++ is covered. Not surpringly, I could see this book fitting in well as a recommended course text book where tutorials and class programming exercises complement the book's contents.

The next eleven chapters are on the Qt development with examples of Patterns and how they are implemented and used within the Qt framework. Finally the remainding third of the book has reference chapters for C++ plus useful articles on memory management, the preprocessor exception handling, databases, inheritance etc.

Complete novices to programming might find this book a bit overwhelming but as it's not intended for them, that doesn't matter. With an impressive amount of example source code and UML this is a useful intro to Qt development for non C++ developers. Even if you know C++ this is still a very useful book for getting up to speed on Qt 4.