[Xcb] favorite xlib(or xcb) books ?

[Christian Linhart]

Hi Patrick,

That's interesting.
That probably means the somebody should write a good book about XCB, maybe me? ;-).

As to good books about Xlib, I can really recommend the O'Reilly series about X:
"The definitive guide to the X Window System".

These are about 10 books.
You need at least the following two:
* "Xlib Programming Manual"
* "Xlib Reference Manual"
and maybe
* "X Protocol Reference Manual"

I have bought the whole series about 17 years ago and I learned X from it to the point that was sufficient for starting to understand the X-Server source code etc.

There are probably newer editions by now. :-)

I don't know about books about XCB.
If you understand Xlib and the X-Protocol, then XCB almost explains itself.
So it is probably sufficient if you work through the O'Reilly books, and the fill in the missing gaps by online resources or reading the XCB sourcecode for specific pieces where you are in doubt.

Once you know everything from the O'Reilly books, I think it'll be OK to ask questions here which go beyond the content of these books. Maybe you'll even become a contributor to XCB then. :-)

Hope this helps,

Chris

P.S.: Is anybody on this list already writing an XCB book?
If not, maybe I really write an XCB book ( if I have time to do that... )


On 11/04/14 00:20, Patrick wrote:
> Hi Everyone
>
> Last week another member mentioned that this list is really for development of xcb and pointed me to some forums.
>
> I have tried but other forums do not attract interest in my posts or quality answers. I have tried to get things done through self study but I have not made much headway despite over a year of effort.
>
> I printed all of the documentation concerning xcb from the main site and studied it diligently. I can create windows and write text to them and monitor events using xcb but that's it.
>
> I bought two xlib books:
> Advanced X windows Applications Programming by Johnson and Reichard. It's okay but it did not cover xpm images. I know libxpm is outside of the scope of pure x windows but I see it as important. libxpm's documentation has no examples.
>
> X Windows Programming From Scratch by Brown hardly covered bare xlib and went straight to Motif which I don't want to use.
>
> I have been downloading and copying snippets for days now and it's pretty frustrating. Many predate autotools and it's hard to even build them.
>
> So basically my goals are to create simple windows with xpm images and to respond to clicks  to those images and to write xpm images to foreign windows, I want to add little icons to an ncurses application.
>
> If you could help me find a book I promise to stay out of everyone's way ! :)
>
> -Patrick
>
>
>
>
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