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:db:sStrong
8th February 2006, 16:56
Hello boys and girls,

I am a new member in this forum and i am a beginner in QT world. Any help would be appreciated.... So dont make fun of my stupid questionsssssssssssssssss ;)

hope to learn alot from u guys.

bye bye

:db:

McToo
8th February 2006, 17:01
Welcome to QtCentre!

I don't think anyone will make fun of questions, we were all learners once - even though some of us can't remember being such... (what's my name?) ;)

McToo

michel
9th February 2006, 14:17
http://www.digitalfanatics.org/projects/qt_tutorial/ is a good place to start. Just make sure to do the examples at the end of each chapter (you will probably need to open the QT API reference in a second window/tab) to try and learn the classes and methods not explicitly used in the tutorial. It also is good to make empty projects and just play around with all of the widgets and make them interact so you get used to how things work. Too many people, I think, try to make their first "practice" program something like a scientific calculator or Tetris or a full-featured desktop publisher or something and wind up quitting because it is more of a bite than they could chew, when they are better off starting with "the program to make buttons 1 through 9 fill a LineEdit widget with the value and worrying about the math when this becomes easy" or "animate a square falling and knowing what the boundaries of its container are then learning how to catch signals from the keyboard" or "putting text into a window and writing it to a file stream then trying to make the program open existing files instead." We all want to do something cool and great, but if it takes you twenty minutes to do any of those first three things, you'd better wait until it takes you five or fewer.

That makes me think: wouldn't it be great if there was a list of simple program ideas for beginners to try? It gives them the behavior/output specs, a screencap of the application, and some hints, and they have to make it themselves? The list could get harder and harder in ascending order. I don't know about anyone else, but for me it is always hard when learning a new programming language to decide how to practice it without a concrete goal of what I want the practice application to accomplish that does not simultaneously overstep my abilities.

fullmetalcoder
9th February 2006, 16:34
That makes me think: wouldn't it be great if there was a list of simple program ideas for beginners to try? It gives them the behavior/output specs, a screencap of the application, and some hints, and they have to make it themselves? The list could get harder and harder in ascending order. I don't know about anyone else, but for me it is always hard when learning a new programming language to decide how to practice it without a concrete goal of what I want the practice application to accomplish that does not simultaneously overstep my abilities.


Follow my path : try out making a fully working IDE, it covers all possible steps :
- complex GUI menu bars, dock widgets, text editing
- heavy use of signals and slots
- data processing to :
* translate project files into understandable and modifiable data
* highlight text depending to a programming language
- process managing to deals with compiling stuffs
- and much more obscure stuffs...:D

Have fun with Qt, it makes programming so easy and gives so much power to coder that it would be a shame not to use it as much as you can!!!

michel
11th February 2006, 14:12
That sounds interesting but I rarely like using IDEs so for me it'd have to be pretty basic. The only IDE that didn't start to piss me off after 5 minutes of using it so far was the one that came (don't know about the newest version; I haven't used it for a year and a half or so) with Bloodshed Software's Dev-C++ for Windows. Being able to manage projects so easily is great, but what really annoys me are all of the "features" of the text editor that just end up getting in my way and slowing me down. Like autoindentation, autocompletion, colorizing different variable types, not using a monospaced font by default (once, like five years ago, I got some frontend to DJGPP that used TIMES NEW ROMAN as the font; what kind of craziness is that for C source or any other language where visually recognizing differences in indentation is helpful?), etc (actually, the only "feature" that never got on my nerves was when it merely bolds the keywords--that's not such a big deal) and whatnot. Luckily in QT Designer you can disable these, but in some of them you don't have a lot of options for customization. I guess I'm just too used to using the command line tools I've used since I was a teenager, like Pico (no, I never "matured" and became a vi or emacs enthusiast despite the fact most people laugh at me when I say I still use Pico for all command-line file management; I'm going on nine years with Pico here, people. I'm too old and set in my ways to change now :)). As for branch highlighting and stuff, I never really saw the need. If you're indenting your code properly in the first place, it's superfluous for the editor to check how many time's you've { { } } 'ed the code. You can just eyeball it and see something isn't right. So...yeah...any IDE I wrote would manage projects the same as most, but the text editor would be really bland and straightforward. Debugging output and being able to click a line of the errors and jump to that section of the file is also pretty helpful.

This message was originally much longer, but then Firefox core dumped yesterday while I was writing it so I had to rewrite it from memory. I guess it was a sign from my computer that I was digressing too much. Or that it's time to upgrade Firefox. I'll leave it to you to decide. Anyway, you intrigued me enough to try it for fun last night and this morning. The full default file and editing menu options are finished, so it's little more than a completely functional equivalent to KEdit with a few add-ons at the moment. But then, that's all I really want when I program in X unless it's something like QT or KDE where I need the visible access to components and the reference documentation. Maybe I'll go back and make the Find/Replace Dialog modeless, but I am going to consider this practice exercise essentially finished. Thanks for the idea. Any others? I see a lot of people trying to make games and animations on the forums. For some reason that never really interested me in the slightest. I have the profoundest respect for people who like it and who can do it well, but it isn't my cup of tea.

ReilenBlaeyze
18th February 2006, 21:01
I'm making an RPG character building app to learn Qt/KDE programming... It's got heavy use of signals/slots, complex GUI, and XML data to top it all off. It's made me learn quite a good part of the Qt API already, and I've not even nearly done... later on I'll be getting to printing, juggling data around the app and all that.

I'm reworking the thing today to better componentize it, since most of the app was turning into a single 2000 line source file, which is certainly not good.

The IDE project is pretty cool too, but seems rather redundant since I have KDevelop which is plenty good :)