[ILUG] What would I need to know\study to make GUI's & scripts

[Barry O'Donovan]

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On Sunday 25 April 2004 08:54, Frank Murphy wrote:
> & scripts to help automate tasks

Well scripts is the easier question. There are many possibilities; shell 
scripting (bash, tcsh, etc) and more scripting languages like perl.

If you simple want to automate tasks then bash (or some other shell) is your 
man. Bash is by far the most prevalent now-a-days. Every "modern" Linux 
distribution I've used uses bash by default.

The man page is the first place to start. Although you won't pick it up easily 
from the man page, you'll certainly get an overview of its capabilites. hen 
add to those capabilities EVERY utility (ls, cp, rm, grep, wc, etc, etc, ad 
infinitum*) that comes with a Linux installation. 

Then there's two essential manuals/guides/books available on-line:

1) The Bash Reference Manual
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html

2) The Advanced Bash Scripting Guide:
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/

> What to I need to help me develop the
> skills\ understanding to create GUI's
> for Linux.

This is a little more difficult and, again, there are many different options 
and one person's reccomendation is the opposite of anothers.

One of the easiest places to start, and where most people do now-a-days, 
especially in college, is Java. Sun's own Java website is a wealth of 
resources including downloadable books and the Java SDK (Software Development 
Kit) itself.

http://java.sun.com/

There are a few other options and they were mentioned in a recent thread:

Qt:			http://www.trolltech.com/qt/
GTK+:		http://www.gtk.org/
wxWidgets:	http://www.wxwidgets.org/

However, it's safe to say if you cannot program in C++ then Java is by far 
your easiest route. Actually, with no programming background, Java is 
probable your ony choice.

Any book you buy on Java will begin with the language itself and work its way 
on to GUI programming. For Qt, GTK+ and wxWidgets you'll first have to learn 
C++ and this is no easy task with no programming background.


* very likely that is mis-spelled and used incorrectly!
- -- 
Regards,
Barry O'Donovan

http://www.ihl.ucd.ie/

Information Hiding Laboratory,
Department of Computer Science,
University College Dublin,
Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

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