Keith Devens .com - Weblog: Best way to learn GUI programming?

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Best way to learn GUI programming?

Questions to all: How did you learn GUI programming? How would you recommend learning?

I've never really done GUI programming before^[1], and given my limited time, my self-education isn't going so well

From my brief survey of GUI toolkits, it seems that most work similarly. You have windows, and you can place widgets on them, possibly using layout managers, and you can nest sub-panels and layout managers arbitrarily. You'll have some kind of event system you can associate callbacks with, etc. Though, what I've just described doesn't really go beyond what I understood before I started digging into all this. Actually writing code to do all of this is much different than just understanding what's going on. It's that "theory vs. practice" thing

Anyway, if anyone wants to share how you picked up GUI programming, or if anyone has any suggestions on good places to look to learn this stuff, please pass it along. Danke.

Footnotes:
[1]: besides Visual Basic, or VBA stuff and forms in Access, both of which I've done a decent amount of, so I'm talking about "hand-written" GUI stuff, not RAD

Permalink | 3 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 4282

00:32 (utc-4)
edited: 00:34 (utc-4)

Comments

Well, I consider building web interfaces GUI programming... But just in case you don't, and if you're looking for design and theory rather than code, look at Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

As mentioned the Apple Human Interface Guidelines is a wonderful resource, but I think the best way to learn GUI design is to study interfaces that you like and don't like. Take the things you like an apply them, take the things you don't like and don't use them. Experience is the best teacher.

∴ August | 30-Sep-2003 10:04am est | http://dotmac.info | #2998

Thanks for the pointer to Apple's user interface guidelines, I'll check them out. However, that covers user interface design, not programming. I also wouldn't consider building web interfaces to be GUI programming. When building a web site one may have to make similar design decisions to those that one makes while designing a desktop application, but marking up a table in HTML is markedly (pun not intended) different than programming a Windows GUI in MFC or the Win32 API, or on OSX using Carbon, or in Java using Swing, etc. Those things take an entirely different skill set than being able to design a pretty interface or being able to mark up a web site in HTML.

∴ Keith | 30-Sep-2003 1:12pm est | http://keithdevens.com/ | #2999

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