[MonoDevelop] Another Monodevelop GTK# book question

Michael Hutchinson m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com
Fri Mar 26 22:36:55 EDT 2010


On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 10:36 AM, gulogulo <kellwood at ameritech.net> wrote:
> I hope you don't mind the question because there seem to be quite a few
> “Book” requests.  I have been picking up the C# language from various
> on-line resources as well as “C# Sharp Essentials”.  I write have a
> reasonable amount of experience with C/C++ coding for numerical analysis.
>
> At this point, I think I  would like to move on to a GUI project that I have
> in mind, which is completely new to me.  There is pretty simple GTK#
> examples on-line for use with monodevelop but I think I need something more
> in-depth.  I am missing some basic things like handling a second window with
> buttons in a project and grabbing the mouse pointer location.  So, I was
> look for a book that would cover these topic for monodevelop/GTK#.  I was
> looking at “Practical Mono” by Mark Mamone.  Is this a reasonable book to
> get me started?  It was published in 2005 – is that too old for the present
> version of monodevelop/GTK#.

Unfortunately there are no Mono-specific books that are up-to-date -
2005 would date to book back to the first half of Mono's history, and
the first fifth of MonoDevelop's history. Fortunately MonoDevelop is
sufficiently similar to Visual Studio that most of the basics from
VS-specific books transfer right over.

There's a decent GTK# tutorial at
http://zetcode.com/tutorials/gtksharptutorial/, and some examples on
the Mono wiki, in MonoDoc, and in Mono GTK# SVN. The mono, monodevelop
and gtk-sharp mailing list archives also have many examples of answers
to these kinds of questions, or you could just ask again, or ask on
stack overflow.

Note that the GTK+ C examples and docs usually are quite
straightforward to translate into GTK#, and there's also a fairly
recent C-based GTK+ book available which *might* be useful for
advanced usage.

In general, one book I strongly recommend is "C# 4.0 in a Nutshell"
(or the 3.0 version) from O'Reilly. It's densely packed with
information about the C# language and the core framework and runtime,
with lots of tiny examples.  It doesn't cover any GUI or web or
database stuff, nor does it use Visual Studio - which means almost
100% of it applies directly to Mono on any platform. It's like a very
readable reference book, and I still find it useful after years of C#
experience. It's definitely *not* a tutorial or introduction, but an
experienced Java or C++ programmer might be able to use it as one.
Another excellent book is the Framework Design Guidelines, which
explains the design principles behind the .NET framework.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com


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