The Definitive Guides to the X Window System: R-3/R-4

O'Reilly and Associates was born as a publisher of technical books when Tim O'Reilly printed out copies of the first edition of this manual and was practically mobbed at a technical convention by eager customers in 1988. This is an extremely well written book on programming with Xlib, an X Window System protocol client library in the C programming language. Xlib contains functions for interacting with an X server that allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the protocol. Few applications use Xlib directly anymore. Instead, they employ other libraries that use Xlib functions to provide widget toolkits such as Xt, Xaw, Motif, GTK+, and Qt. However, if you are going to need to program in Xlib directly, this is an essential book. The table of contents is as follows: Chapter 1 Introduction - This chapter gives the big picture: what X is all about and some fundamentals of how it works. Chapter 2 X Concepts - This chapter introduces the concepts that underlie X programming. You should read this chapter even if you are the type of person who likes to jump right into coding. Chapter 3 Basic Window Program - Every Xlib program has a similar structure. This chapter shows a simple calculator program that puts up a window and handles events in that window. You can use this simple application as a template for your own more complex applications. All clients will use the techniques described and demonstrated here. Chapter 4 Window Attributes - The window attributes control a window's background and border pattern or color, the events that should be queued for it, and so on. This chapter describes how to set and get window attributes and provides a detailed description of each attribute. Chapter 5 The Graphics Context - The graphics primitives supplied with X are quite simple. Most of the details about how graphics are to be drawn are stored in a resource called a graphics context (GC). GCs are stored in the server, thus reducing the amount of information that needs to be transmitted for each graphics request. This chapter describes how to use GCs and provides details on each member of the XGCValues structure. Chapter 6 Drawing Graphics and Text - This chapter describes the routines used to draw lines, geometrical figures, and text. It also discusses the use of the pixmaps, images, and regions. Chapter 7 Color - This chapter describes how to use color in your programs. Color handling in X can be more complex than in other graphics systems because of the need for portability to many different types of displays. This chapter starts with the basics, and gradually moves to more advanced topics, including R5 device-independent color. Chapter 8 Events - Events are central to X. The fundamental framework for handling events was given in Chapter 3, but this chapter gives much more detail, both on selecting events for a window and on handling them when they arrive. It discusses each of the masks used to select events; for a

Unfortunately, X11 programming is extremely complex. This book is not perfect, but does guide you through the labyrinth. If you are going to program in X11, you need to get this book.

X is a little cyptic but very powerful.This book does an extremely good and thorough job of documenting Xlib programming.It is without a doubt the best technical reference I have ever read.

FYI: you don't need volume 2... This book is cryptic and messy, but so is X. I've used it a lot whenever the man pages get too ugly.