Open Source Messaging Application Development: Building and Extending Gaim

This book will give the finest developers a perfect training session in open source development, the community, gtk+, and of course, gaim. As for young developers, it introduces your into the community as we know it, and all the possibilities of 'how to get started'. Sean encourages you throughout the book, especially in the beginning, to get involved, how to ask questions, be a contributor and be someone who is wanted in a community. The book is very rich and covers so many aspects, along with the coverage it also gives you helpful links for other projects you may want to work on, such as developing in gtk+ or helping the jabber community. It is not a 'Help us work on the project!' it is also a FANTASTIC introduction into Open Source and how it operates, what drives people, what makes it run, what is at its core. It covers every aspect of Gaim, along with helpful examples about how to program and develop in Gaim. It cuts out all of the crap of normal development books, and dives straight into 'getting started with your plugin'. It is very enthusiastic, and you can tell the passion of these developers, and Sean. Along with the code, Sean also shares his experience with you. He shares his ideas and experience with Open Source, and the community as a whole. He gives you PRICELESS information on how to act in an Open Source community to get respect from others. His analogies and breaking-down of the Community is incredible, linking to documentation and howto's all over the book, it is simply incredible. For any developer, young or old, experienced or just written a hello world application, this book needs to be on your bookshelf. -bk

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the the combination of depth and readability. Quite often a book with this level of coverage and depth will be fairly inaccessible, and simultaineously too long. Mr. Egan has managed to provide a significant access to the content while doing it a manner close to a good story.

This is an extremely well written book and the author does a great job covering a number of areas including the GTK, TCP/IP and socket programming. It also provides great examples for the often convoluted steps on how to actually get access to the source code as well as to the usual compile/edit/debug tools available within the open-source community and get everything installed properly. There's plenty of GAIM-specific information to be found and one should be able to build plugins with little or no difficulty. There's also a basic overview of the OOP approach to development.

I bought this book to get insight into gaim and opensource in general. Mission acomplished. The author has done a terrific job of starting from basics and build the blocks with short and to the point examples.

I highly recommend this book. It covers exactly what is described... getting started with open-source development. This book won't make you a god at GTK+, it won't make you a networking wizard, and you won't be able to rewrite CVS from scratch after reading it. That would take a whole shelf of books and more. However, it WILL provide you a working knowledge of the open-source process, development tools (compilers, build systems, a debugger, version control, bug trackers), object-oriented programming concepts, a graphical application programming toolkit, network programming, internationalization, and cross-platform portability. This book uses Gaim as an example, but most of the knowledge you'll gain isn't specific to Gaim. I'm not new to open-source development, so I was familiar with the tools listed in the book. I've also been coding on Gaim for about 8 months now and was recently promoted to developer. Still, I learned things from this book. For example, I had never bothered to find out exactly what the numbers in a patch hunk meant. This was covered in the book, allowing me to better handle patches I review. I also learned more about Unicode and UTF-8, the OSCAR protocol, and even learned a couple Gaim-specific things. Even for an experienced developer, this book was money well spent and I'm recommending it to all my friends who want to try open-source development.