56) What books are available for Motif programmers?

[Last modified: Mar 97]

Answer:  Note: Code examples are now available for Sebern's "Building
OSF/Motif Applications: A Practical Introduction" (below).

        NOTE: This answer is always "under construction". If you are the
        author of, or an avid fan of, a book not listed here, send mail
        to ksall@cen.com.  Corrections especially regarding new editions
        and ISBN's would be greatly appreciated.

        Authors: Do you have code examples online? Send me the location.

        Most of these books can be purchased at a discount from:

                libHiTech.a, The Exclusive Electronic Computer Book Club
                http://www.libhitech.com/libhitech/

        Another electronic book service is:

                The Bookpool - Internet Bookstore
                http://www.bookpool.com/


For Motif 2.0, see also the subject "Where can I find Motif 2.0
documentation?" as Prentice Hall has published the Motif 2.0 documentation.

First, we present the official books from OSF. Then we include an alphabetical
listing of selected books. (See the following question for Xt and Xlib books.)

The "official" OSF/Motif 1.1 and 1.2 books are:

OSF/Motif Programmers Guide, Prentice-Hall ISBN 13-640525-8 (Motif 1.0), ISBN
0-13-640681-5 (Motif 1.1), ISBN 0-13-643107-0 (Motif 1.2) (NB: This makes use
of the demo programs that you get with a Motif source license.  The programs
are not included and may or may not be available on your system.)

OSF/Motif Programmers Reference Manual, Prentice-Hall ISBN 13-640517-17 (Motif
1.0), ISBN 0-13-640616-5 (Motif 1.1), ISBN 0-13-643115-1 (Motif 1.2) You will
need this for the system calls.

OSF/Motif Style Guide, Prentice-Hall 13-640491-X (Motif 1.0), ISBN
0-13-640673-4 (Motif 1.1), ISBN 13-643123-2 (Motif 1.2) You will need this to
get some idea of how to write programs with the correct `look and feel'.


Next is an alphabetical listing (by author) of a number of essential books not
by OSF but in wide use. I will attempt to keep this list current if the
authors (or their readers) send me updates as new editions become available.

Barkakati, Nabajyoti, X Window System Programming, SAMS. ISBN 0-672-22750-9.
This contains a section on Motif.

Berlage, Thomas Berlage, OSF/Motif: Concepts and Programming, Addison-Wesley,
UK, 1991. ISBN 0-201-55792-4.

Ferguson, Paula & Brennan, David, Motif Reference Manual, Volume 6B, O'Reilly
& Associates, 1st Edition June 1993, 920 pages, ISBN: 1-56592-038-4.  "Dan
Heller's Motif Programming Manual [Volume 6A, below] has long been considered
the most authoritative and insightful work on Motif. Now, with the addition of
this companion reference manual, programmers can dispense completely with the
original OSF documentation. In addition to covering the entire Motif toolkit,
this book also covers OSF's "User Interface Language" or UIL, and the Motif
Resource Manager (MRM) functions used to tie together applications with user
interfaces defined in UIL."

Updated Sept. 95:
Flanagan, David, Motif Tools: Streamlined GUI Design and Programming with the
Xmt Library, O'Reilly & Associates, 1st Edition August 1994, 1024 pages, ISBN:
1-56592-044-9.  "Motif Tools and the Xmt programming library that accompanies
it on CD-ROM offer resources to empower Motif programmers and dramatically
speed up application development with the X Toolkit and Motif.  The Xmt
library contains nine custom widgets and over 250 convenience routines that
handle many tricky aspects of GUI programming. The Layout widget, for example,
is an incredibly flexible manager widget that makes the confusing and awkward
Motif Form widget a thing of the past. And a single Menu widget will create an
entire pulldown menu system for your application by reading a special menu
description from a resource file or your C code. Other features of the library
dramatically simplify the use of Motif XmStrings, automate the transfer of
data between the fields of an application's data structures and the widgets of
its dialog boxes, and make it possible to automatically create a widget
hierarchy completely described in a resource file."

NOTE: Xmt version 2.1.2 is available for Motif 2.0. See:

        ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/xbook/Xmt/xmt212.tar.gz

Added Sept. 95:
George, Alistair and Riches, Mark, Advanced Motif Programming Techniques,
Prentice Hall, 1994. ISBN: 0-13-219965-3.  Glenn Carr (gcarr@lgc.com) writes:


"This is a concise book that has alot of great tips and other insightful
information about less obvious Motif characteristics."

Heller, Dan, Ferguson, Paula M. & Brennan, David, Motif Programming Manual,
Volume 6A, O'Reilly & Associates, 2nd Edition February 1994, ISBN: 1-56592-
016-3.  "The Motif Programming Manual describes how to write applications
using the Motif toolkit from the Open Software Foundation (OSF). The book goes
into detail on every Motif widget class, with useful examples that will help
programmers to develop their own code. Anyone doing Motif programming who
doesn't want to have to figure it out on their own needs this book."  Although
updated for Motif 1.2, it is still usable with Motif 1.1.

Johnson, Eric F. and Kevin Reichard, Power Programming Motif, second edition,
MIS: Press, New York, NY, 1993. ISBN 1-55828-322-6.

Johnson, Eric F. and Kevin Reichard, Professional Graphics Programming in the
X Window System, MIS: Press, New York, NY, 1993. ISBN 1-55828-255-6.  This
book covers difficult topics such as combining non-default visuals and color
overlay planes with Motif applications.

Kimball, Paul E., The X Toolkit Cookbook, Prentice Hall, 1995. ISBN 0-13-
973132-6. Covers the Toolkit in detail and also covers Motif & Athena widgets;
good chapter on inter-client communication and working with other toolkits.
Discussion of X11R6 features. Code examples in
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/pk/pkimball/cookbook/.  Submitted by
raju@BooBoo.wes.army.mil (Raju Kala).

Newmarch, Jan, The X Window System and Motif - A Fast Track Approach.
Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-53931-4.  As the long-time maintainer of this Motif
FAQ, Jan's book is bound to contain unusual and useful insights.

O'Reilly and Associates publishes an entire series of books concerning
different aspects of the X Window System, including a number of books about
Motif, as well as books on Xlib, Xt, and PEX. In this FAQ, we list O'Reilly
books by the authors' names. For a summary of all of O'Reilly's X11 series,
see:

    ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/docs/Xbibliography.OReilly

As of this writing, however, the above list was somewhat out-dated.
Therefore, telnet to gopher.ora.com, login as "gopher", select "Detailed
Product Descriptions", and then select from the menu. WWW users can open this
URL:

    gopher://gopher.ora.com/11/descriptions/

Sebern, Mark "Building OSF/Motif Applications: A Practical Introduction". The
ISBN is 0-13-122409-3. Prentice-Hall. The book uses a large, realistic Motif
application (a program to make slides for presentations) to demonstrate the
use of Motif features. Both UIL and toolkit calls are discussed, though UIL is
featured, both in the examples and in a reference chapter. The example code is
available at ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/book_examples/sebern.motifapp-1.1.tar.Z.

Smith, Jerry, Designing X Clients with Xt/Motif, ISBN 1-55860-255-0 Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers This adopts a higher-level approach to many of the objects
that commonly occur in Motif but are not in the Motif API.

Young, Douglas, "Object-Oriented Programming with C++ and OSF/Motif", Prentice
Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-13-630252-1. Source code is
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/book_examples/young.cxx.tar.Z

Young, Douglas, "The X Window System: Programming and Applications with Xt,
Motif Edition", Prentice Hall, 1994. ISBN 0-13-123803-5. This is the classic
tutorial from 1989 updated for Motif 1.2.  Source code is
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/book_examples/young2.motif.tar.Z

Young, Douglas, "Motif Debugging and Performance Tuning", Prentice Hall, 1995.
ISBN 0-13-147984-9. Source code is
ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/book_examples/young.debug.tar.Z

If you want to learn about UIL, one source is the "Motif Programmers's Guide"
from Prentice-Hall.  However, excellent UIL coverage appears in the O'Reilly
and Associates books "Motif Programming Manual, Volume 6A" by Dan Heller and
Paula M. Ferguson and in "Motif Reference Manual, Volume 6B" by Paula M.
Perguson with UIL Material by David Brennan. (Yes, 6A and 6B were worth the
wait!)

Added May 97:
Thomas C. McFarland, "X Windows on the World, Developing Internationalized
Software with X, Motif, and CDE".  ISBN 0-13-359787-3.  Source code is
ftp://ftp.prenhall.com/pub/ptr/hewlett_packard_professional_books.w-
064/mcfarland/xwindows.wld