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Title: Cross-Platform Development in C++: Building Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Applications
ISBN: 032124642X
Author:
Syd Logan
Publicate Date: 2007-12-07
Publish: 2007-12-07
List Price: $49.99
Average Customer Rating: 3.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $37.05
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $28.00
Amazon Merchant Price: $40.45
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Not useful
This is a grab-bag of pretty weak essays about software development.
A small set of mostly irrelevant technologies is focused on.
XUL is a good cross platform technology, but the author's own fledgling effort, trixul, has too little substance and too much focus.
Too much time is spent introducing basic technologies - compilers, html, source code control, css - that the audience might be expected to already know in far greater detail than discussed here.
By limiting the discussion to C++, really successful cross-platform technologies such as Java and .net/mono are never discussed.
CVS is recommended over Subversion - this, in 2008!
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2: Good book
To be honest this one of the few technical computer books I've read from cover to cover. I usually just use them for reference. On the subject of cross platform development this is currently the best and most up-to-date however there were a few areas I would have liked to seen covered better most notably the build environment and makes. Mr Logan does touch on these subjects but they are not given as much focus as I would have like to have seen which is why I'm taking one star away. With that said if I was asked to recommend a book on cross-platform development it would be Syd Logan's, hands down..
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3: reduce porting bugs
Logan tackles a lot of grubby little complications that are the bane and reality of programmers writing multiplatform C++. This is not a book about learning C++ from scratch. Conceptually, it helps to think of this book as about 1 level above writing C++ code. For example, it discusses compiling, linking and running, where needed libraries might be missing.
The book describes 3 platforms. Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and unix/linux. Strictly, the Macintosh is nowadays using a unix variant. But it's done differently enough, and the Mac is popular enough, that Logan stands it separate from other unix/linux environments.
Perhaps the best recommendation of the book is to use a platform abstraction library. So that you can far more easily maintain a common code base. The suggested choice of library is NSPR. One simple way that it helps is in how it makes explicit the byte lengths of various C/C++ variables. This legacy C ambiguity is still with us, and causes much porting pain. It is no accident that newer languages like Java and C# make these definitions explicit. But many of us still have to write in C and C++.
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