Qt Learning resources

[Saman]

Hello, I'm a Electronic engineer and MFC C++ programmer(6 years commercial experience). Currently I use plain C to program microcontrollers of my devices without any graphics . I was considering to learn a new language so it both be useful for embedded programming and also desktop programing. I was considering Java and C# until I bumped into Qt. It was appealing for me because it is native and I'm already a native programmer.
where should I begin? I'm looking for worthy resources.

also another question:
is Qt message based like MFC? I mean in MFC we have CCmdTarget that I noticed is absent in Qt. If it is not then who objects communicate without violating encapsulation?

regards,

[munna]

Qt Assistant (http://doc.trolltech.com/) is the best resource for getting started. It has every thing that you need to know.

[fullmetalcoder]

is Qt message based like MFC? I mean in MFC we have CCmdTarget that I noticed is absent in Qt. If it is not then who objects communicate without violating encapsulation?
As you will find out when reading the docs (http://doc.trolltech.com/) (by far the best I have ever found for any library thus far) Qt offers two mecanism for inter-object communication : events (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/eventsandfilters.html) and signals/slots (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/signalsandslots.html) and these are not the only useful feature of its object model (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.5/object.html).

[Saman]

Thanks,
is there also a good PDF format resource for offline reading. All I could find were very brief introduction.
I also would like to know if is there any MFC programmer here moved to Qt. I want to know how difficult transition will be. Or is there any chance my personal MFC libs can be converted to Qt with least effort.

Hopefully I become a more frequent user here after a while and see you guys more.

regards,

[fullmetalcoder]

is there also a good PDF format resource for offline reading.
None that I know of, but there are a couple of books available however (don't know the references by heart but a quick search on Amazon should be enough to find them).

[Lykurg]

is there also a good PDF format resource for offline reading. All I could find were very brief introduction.

If you just look for offline: the docs are bundled and could be read offline. For good books:

Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield: C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4 (2nd Edition) (Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development Series)
Johan Thelin: Foundations of Qt® Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

[andy.fillebrown]

I stumbled into a great free book a few weeks ago about design and style using qt.
http://cartan.cas.suffolk.edu/oopdocbook/opensource/index.html

I'd put it on the "must-read" list.

~ Andy Fillebrown ~

[KaptainKarl]

I was a former MFC coder and also dabbled in Borland CBuilder quite a bit.
I find that QT is much more intuitive than either of those and seems less burdensome to code. Since I have also historically coded a lot in Linux, it is good to have a common framework.

If you used Visual C as your IDE, you can continue to use with QT or you can switch to QTCreator. Visual C has some features lacking from QTCreator and debugger is faster. But QTCreator is missing lot of the fluff in Visual C making the learning curve very short and, in my opinion, making the development process easier. Also, if you plan to do anything in Linux, MAC or other UNIX based computers, you can move your sources from one computer to the other and have the same IDE waiting there to continue developing.

This might help you migrate from MFC to QT:
http://doc.trolltech.com/solutions/qtwinmigrate/winmigrate-walkthrough.html

Karl

[Saman]

Thank you, I have heard library richness in Qt is something between MFC and .Net. I don't know if you are aware of microsoft's recent feature pack upgrade of MFC. It is a big upgrade and one of interesting features of this upgrade is that it has introduced visual studio 2005 style docking pane with auto hiding and office 2007 style ribbon bar. surprisingly these features are currently absent in microsoft's dearly loved .Net and microsoft has announced it will support these features in .Net in 2010 edition.
I have heard there were serious programs developed with Qt like Adobe Photoshop Album, Mathematica and KDE but I also would like to know about support and availability of advanced UI libraries. You are probably familiar with codeproject site, a major code sharing site. I have many times used high quality shared codes that were not available in MFC's supplied libraries at that time. unfortunately there is no Qt support in codeproject but is there any code sharing site for Qt programmers or we are totally dependent on libraries developed by supplier?

thanks