Dear Reader,

As a working programmer, I use Qt every day, and I am really impressed by the organization, design, and power that Qt brings to the C++ programmer.

While Qt began life as a cross-platform GUI toolkit, it has expanded to include portable facilities for just about every aspect of day-to-day programming: files, processes, networking, and database access, to name just a few. Because of Qt’s broad applicability, you really can write your code once and just recompile it on a different platform in order to have it work out of the box. This is extraordinarily valuable when your customer base requires your product to run on different platforms.

Of course, because Qt is also available with an open source license, if you’re an open source developer, you too can benefit from everything Qt has to offer.

While Qt comes with extensive online help, that help is primarily reference oriented. The example programs are useful, but it can be hard to reverse engineer correct use of Qt for your programs just by reading the examples. And that is where this book comes into the picture.

This is a really neat book. First, it’s the official book on Qt from Trolltech, which says a lot. But it’s also a great book: well organized, well written, and easy to follow and learn from. The combination of a great book about a great technology makes for a real winner, and that is why I am very proud and excited to have this book in the Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development Series.

I hope you will enjoy reading this book and that you will learn a lot from it; I certainly did.