Programming with curses (A Nutshell Handbook)

Rating:
Summary: OK, but...
Review: OK on basic information, could use some more examples. My main goal was using color with SCO/Linux programs. Unfortunatly this book gives no hint that color is even possible, much less how to do it. This book must be 20 years old and doesn't appear to have been updated in all that time. HAY!!! There are color terminals now!!! And Curses supports them!!! Xterms can be in color too!!!
I found the doc files about "ncurses" that came with my "Slackware Linux" far more helpful than this book.
The book is probably OK for intro in a classroom setting to give students background, but I can't really recommend it. You can get more "useful" info from a "Yahoo" search or from linux "ncurses" documentation.
It can provide a quick reference for finding which curses function calls to use to do basic windowing and such.

Rating:
Summary: OK, but...
Review: OK on basic information, could use some more examples. My main goal was using color with SCO/Linux programs. Unfortunatly this book gives no hint that color is even possible, much less how to do it. This book must be 20 years old and doesn't appear to have been updated in all that time. HAY!!! There are color terminals now!!! And Curses supports them!!! Xterms can be in color too!!!
I found the doc files about "ncurses" that came with my "Slackware Linux" far more helpful than this book.
The book is probably OK for intro in a classroom setting to give students background, but I can't really recommend it. You can get more "useful" info from a "Yahoo" search or from linux "ncurses" documentation.
It can provide a quick reference for finding which curses function calls to use to do basic windowing and such.

Rating:
Summary: A good picture -- and all I could find
Review: This book is the only general resource I could find on curses programming. Since everyone wants to make forms on character interfaces, the best way to do it through the standard TTY drivers is with the curses library. The examples were enough to prove to me that it's not a plug-in method, but that one needs to adapt one's application to use the curses library from top to bottom. It will be better to write my program with curses in mind from the beginning than to try to retrofit a finished product.

Rating:
Summary: A good picture -- and all I could find
Review: This book is the only general resource I could find on curses programming. Since everyone wants to make forms on character interfaces, the best way to do it through the standard TTY drivers is with the curses library. The examples were enough to prove to me that it's not a plug-in method, but that one needs to adapt one's application to use the curses library from top to bottom. It will be better to write my program with curses in mind from the beginning than to try to retrofit a finished product.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat disappointed with this book....
Review: While this book covers most of what you need to know, it would have been a great book if it gave the information in an orderly format. The only code is the spreadsheet (too simple) application at the end of the book. The documentation that came with sunos 4.1 is more comprehensive.