Cross-platform Development Books

Cross-Platform Development in C++: Building Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Applications

Syd Logan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Cross-Platform Development in C++ is the definitive guide to developing portable C/C++ application code that will run natively on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux/Unix platforms without compromising functionality, usability, or quality.

Long-time Mozilla and Netscape developer Syd Logan systematically addresses all the technical and management challenges associated with software portability from planning and design through coding, testing, and deployment. Drawing on his extensive experience with cross-platform development, Logan thoroughly covers issues ranging from the use of native APIs to the latest strategies for portable GUI development. Along the way, he demonstrates how to achieve feature parity while avoiding the problems inherent to traditional cross-platform development approaches.

This book will be an indispensable resource for every software professional and technical manager who is building new cross-platform software, porting existing C/C++ software, or planning software that may someday require cross-platform support.

Build Cross-Platform Applications without Compromise

Throughout the book, Logan illuminates his techniques with realistic scenarios and extensive, downloadable code examples, including a complete cross-platform GUI toolkit based on Mozilla’s XUL that you can download, modify, and learn from. Coverage includes

• Policies and procedures used by Netscape, enabling them to ship Web browsers to millions of users on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux
• Delivering functionality and interfaces that are consistent on all platforms
• Understanding key similarities and differences among leading platform-specific GUI APIs, including Win32/.NET, Cocoa, and Gtk+
• Determining when and when not to use native IDEs and how to limit their impact on portability
• Leveraging standards-based APIs, including POSIX and STL
• Avoiding hidden portability pitfalls associated with floating point, char types, data serialization, and types in C++
• Utilizing platform abstraction libraries such as the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR)
• Establishing an effective cross-platform bug reporting and tracking system
• Creating builds for multiple platforms and detecting build failures across platforms when they occur
• Understanding the native runtime environment and its impact on installation
• Utilizing wxWidgets to create multi-platform GUI applications from a single code base
• Thoroughly testing application portability
• Understanding cross-platform GUI toolkit design with Trixul

Crystal Reports XI for Developers

David McAmis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Crystal Reports XI is a powerful software tool for turning raw data into corporate decision-making information. End-users and developers alike use Crystal Reports to extract and format information, and with over 9 million licenses shipped Crystal Reports is one of the most popular packages for corporate reporting. Crystal Reports XI for Developers provides a solid introduction for any report or application developer just getting started with Crystal Reports. Using this practical guide, they will learn to create presentation-quality reports from a variety of data sources, and how to add the advanced features developers need to analyze report data. Developers will learn to create simple and complex reports with the formatting and organization techniques presented in the book, and how to add filtering and summaries to crunch millions of rows of data into a concise and meaningful format. They will also learn to create their own formulas and SQL Expressions, as well as how to use advanced Crystal Reports features such as subreports, cross-tabs, charts, dynamic parameters, and more. Going beyond the sample reports that ship with the product, Crystal Reports XI for Developers is filled with step-by-step essentials and real-world examples, showing readers how to take full advantage of Crystal Reports key features so they can create information-rich, quality reports from their own data and integrate them into their own applications.

Write Portable Code: An Introduction to Developing Software for Multiple Platforms

Brian Hook

Amazon Price: $26.56 List Price: $34.95 By: No Starch Press Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $4.30

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Portable software development is writing software that runs on a broad range of computer systems instead of just one (e.g., Windows). Programmers often pick up the idioms, tricks and methodologies for developing cross-platform software through sheer trial and error, as they encounter the same mistakes and patterns of code over time. If you're an intermediate-to advanced-level programmer who'd rather cut to the chase, Write Portable Code contains the lessons, patterns and knowledge you'll need for developing cross-platform software.

Write Portable Code explains how to:

avoid common portability mistakes when starting out a new project, thereby saving time when a port must occur

re-factor existing, non-portable code so that it can be easily transplanted to new platforms

find bugs masked by platform specific behaviors

Programmers who avoid becoming married to a specific development environment or target platform greatly expand the target market for their software products. Whether you design cross-platform software from the ground up or have to move large amounts of code from one platform to another, the information contained in Write Portable Code will help you achieve your goals and grow as a programmer.

TOC
Preface
Introduction Chapter 1: Preparing for Portability Chapter 2: ANSI C/C++ Chapter 3: Techniques for Portability Chapter 4: Editing and Source Control Chapter 5: Processor Differences Chapter 6: Floating Point Chapter 7: Preprocessor Chapter 8: Compiler Quirks Chapter 9: User Interaction Chapter 10: Networking Chapter 11: Operating Systems Chapter 12: Dynamic Libraries Chapter 13: Security and Permissions Chapter 14: File Systems Chapter 15: Scalability and Portability Chapter 16: Portability and Data Chapter 17: Internationalization and Localization Chapter 18: Scripting Languages Chapter 19: Cross-platform Libraries and Toolkits
Appendix A: POSH Appendix B: The Simple Audio Library Appendix C: The Rules for Portability References

Cross-Platform Game Programming (Game Development) (Game Development)

Steven Goodwin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With many of today's games being released simultaneously on all platforms, the need for a good cross-platform development strategy is essential. Cross-Platform Game Programming covers this rarely discussed area and provides the techniques needed to develop your games effectively. It explains the plethora of problems that exist within every cross-platform game, and gives you the understanding and ability needed to solve them. It also teaches you how to write code that behaves identically on all machines. In addition, the book explains why standard libraries are not standard enough, and covers the nuances between compilers, debuggers, and operating systems. Throughout the book, how-to guidelines are provided for using the same code to handle different hardware specifications without change for ported games, or those being build to work cross-platform from the ground up. It helps senior and lead programmers determine where the platform-specific features should start and end, and provides methods for achieving this. It also includes support for those using middleware by demonstrating how to write code that will run identically on different machines, despite the platform making use of the same APIs. Because this book teaches the methods, not the API, it scales well for future platforms and empowers you to create your own designs.

Programming with Qt (2nd Edition)

Matthias Dalheimer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For anyone programming Qt, Programming with Qt, Second Edition provides an excellent one-volume tutorial and reference to virtually all the features and APIs available in the powerful Qt C++ GUI cross-platform library. Whether you are just starting out with Qt, or want to catch up on new and advanced features, this title offers an invaluable resource for readers.

The no-nonsense approach and right-on-target examples help distinguish this text. The book begins by making a case for cross-platform development. (Qt shows that Java is not the only game in town in this regard.) A later section on good GUI design and some hints for better portability help make this title a good way to learn GUI programming from the ground up.

Short, clear examples show off the basics, starting with a "Hello World" application. Emphasis is on using the Qt APIs effectively rather than getting bogged down in C++ syntax. Since GUI programming is a strength, the author covers the built-in "widgets" available in Qt in excellent detail, including fancier controls like tables and new dial components. The Qt library is also a general-purpose application framework, and there's coverage here for file APIs, collections, and late-breaking support for XML processing.

The basics are augmented here with short sections showing particular APIs at work. Most readers will likely find the material on Qt's SQL Module for database programming indispensable. A section on custom controls is also a standout and more advanced readers will learn how to using OpenGL calls in Qt as well as how to interoperate with Perl modules.

The book closes with sections that will benefit the less experienced Qt developer, including how to use Visual C++ 6 to let you build Qt executables, and how to take advantage of Qt's Designer tool to simplify designing forms and components visually.

Right up to date with the latest on Qt from top to bottom, this text really shines with its notably concise and authoritative style that readers will have come to expect from O'Reilly titles. For anyone tackling Qt development, the second edition of Programming Qt is sure to be a necessary addition to your programming bookshelf. --Richard Dragan

REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development (Developer's Library)

Mark S. Choate

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

I beg to differ 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I found this book AMAZINGLY helpful! I'm a Java, C and C++ programmer moving over to RB because
it's cross platform and has a very easy GUI development system. I DON'T need another book to answer
what a byte is, how to write a loop or how to do Object Oriented Design.

This book does not coddle you. It assumes you know the basics of programming. It assumes you know
what you want to do. It will tell you how to do it. I have sticky tags all over my book, and it lives
at my right hand on my desk. It tells you all the strangenesses of RB on the different platforms, and how
to do the harder things. First read all the other books to learn the language. THEN GET THIS ONE!!!
You will be using it consistently.

Editorial Review:

REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development treats REALbasic as a serious development environment and is targeted to developers with a minimum of programming experience, but who may or may not be new to the REALbasic platform. Written by a writer and developer with extensive REALbasic experience with input and guidance from REAL Software, this book will show you how to take advantage of the new cross-platform abilities of REALbasic and teach you how to create cross-platform applications. Don't waste any more time with the other novice-oriented REALbasic books out there. Get inside this development environment with REALbasic Cross-Platform Application Development.

Cross-Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable.NET, and Microsoft .NET

M.J. Easton, Jason King

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Well, I came home today to a pleasant surprise (Cross-Platform .NET Development: Using Mono, Portable.NET, and Microsoft .NET). So I can start freestyling, cross-platform style.

— Bill Ryan, Bill's House O Insomnia

An enthusiastically recommended resource especially for anyone pursuing, building, or studying for a career in the field.

— Midwest Book Review, Internet Bookwatch

.NET is not just for Windows anymore! And this unprecedented book examines the advantages of building portable, cross-platform.NET code. Even if you are only vaguely familiar with .NET, with the aid of this book, you'll quickly learn how to run .NET code on different platforms.

You may run code among the Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows platforms. And you'll get to choose among Mono (for Linux), Portable.NET (for Mac OS X), and of course, .NET for Windows. What's more, authors Mark Easton and Jason King pack the book with example code and wisdom, providing you a well-rounded skill set. Based on years of personal .NET experience, the authors share years of expertisedos, donts, pitfalls, gotchas, and insightsin the convenience of a single, handy book.

.NET Multithreading

Alan Dennis

List Price: $34.95 By: Manning Publications Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $78.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Pretty bad 1 out of 5 stars.
9 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is just plain bad.

The source code is awful. Not only is it poorly formatted, sometimes incorrect and in an annoying mix of C# and VB.NET, but the examples are often horribly incomplete. I usually read programming books by skimming the source and text at the same time but I can't do that in .NET Multithreading because many of the examples are just snippets and are lacking in important information such as types. I was often forced to either slog through the text or hit MSDN to figure out what was going on.

The other reviewers' comments on the lack of depth are right on the mark. You'll get enough information to write trivial little applications, but that's about it. To its credit, the book does do a decent job of warning you about multithreading problems, though I think it should do a better job of instilling a healthy sense of fear in threading newbies.

If you really want to understand multithreading, I'd recommend reading Tannenbaum's OS book for the basics, followed by the MSDN literature for .NET specifics. It also helps to read a book on Win32 multithreading so you can understand what's going on underneath the .NET layer. You should also read Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows.

I probably would not buy this book again.

Editorial Review:

With an understanding of the .NET framework, stable and robust multithreaded applications can be developed with minimal effort. Covering the topics related to multithreaded development, this book not only focuses on how a task is performed but also on the more important question of why these tasks are performed. The strengths and weaknesses of each approach to multithreading are analyzed so that programmers and developers can choose the appropriate approach based on their particular constraints. Complete coverage of multithreading development using the .NET framework in both Visual Basic .NET and C# is provided in addition to detailed analyses of threads, delegates, asynchronous execution, threadpools, and locks.

SOAP: Cross Platform Web Services Development Using XML

Scott Seely, Kent Sharkey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Poorly organized 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

I felt this book was poorly organized, and lacking in the type of information I wanted.

Chapter 1 is a history of the computer, starting with the abacus. (I'm not kidding.) Chapter 2 is an overview of XML, which might have been useful except that this book is clearly not aimed at people unfamiliar with XML. Chapter 3 is a rehash of the SOAP specification. While potentially interesting, this chapter (like the specification itself) is a blow-by-blow discussion of very minute details of the SOAP syntax. This chapter would have been better as an appendix. Better yet, just provide a hyperlink to the SOAP specification for those who are interested.

The remainder of the book is made up of two example applications and some "oh by the way" disccusions of issues more or less related to SOAP itself. Chapter 4 discusses a "simple" SOAP application in great detail. This was the chapter I found most nearly useful. Chapters 5 and 6 cover WSDL and UDDI, not SOAP. Chapter 7 talks about vendor-specific implementations of SOAP--a chapter that is already totally outdated. Chapter 8 through the end discusses a single large application built using soap. For me, Chapter 4 was the only one that came close to providing real value.

In summary, this is yet another "talk about anything to fill up the pages" book. If you remove 100+ pages of raw source code, 5 chapters that give general introductions to the history of the computer, XML, WSDL, and UDDI, you wind up with about 40 pages of poorly organized, scattered writings about SOAP itself. Not worth the [the money], in my opinion.

Developer's Guide to Web Application Security

Matt Fisher

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

75% of attacks targeted against specific systems are aimed against the web application itself; not the operating system or network. While current security technologies and practices are aimed for the operating system and network, the custom developed software that runs the web application is the most exposed portion of any website, and often the most vulnerable. This book defines Web application security, why it should be addressed earlier in the lifecycle in development and quality assurance, and how it differs from other types of Internet security. Additionally, the book examines the procedures and technologies that are essential to developing, penetration testing and releasing a secure Web application. Through a review of recent Web application breaches, the book will expose the prolific methods hackers use to execute Web attacks using common vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting and Buffer Overflows in the application layer. By taking an in-depth look at the techniques hackers use to exploit Web applications, readers will be better equipped to protect confidential.