Book Image

Getting Started with Qt 5

By : Benjamin Baka
Book Image

Getting Started with Qt 5

By: Benjamin Baka

Overview of this book

Qt is a cross-platform application framework and widget toolkit that is used to create GUI applications that can run on different hardware and operating systems. The main aim of this book is to introduce Qt to the reader. Through the use of simple examples, we will walk you through building blocks without focusing too much on theory. Qt is a popular tool that can be used for building a variety of applications, such as web browsers, media players such as VLC, and Adobe Photoshop. Following Qt installation and setup, the book dives straight into helping you create your first application. You will be introduced to Widgets, Qt's interface building block, and the many varieties that are available for creating GUIs. Next, Qt's core concept of signals and slots are well illustrated with sufficient examples. The book further teaches you how to create custom widgets, signals and slots, and how to communicate useful information via dialog boxes. To cap everything off, you will be taken through writing applications that can connect to databases in order to persist data. By the end of the book, you should be well equipped to start creating your own Qt applications and confident enough to pick up more advanced Qt techniques and materials to hone your skills.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Installing Qt on macOS

There are a variety of ways to get Qt installed on a Mac. To begin the process of installing Qt 5 on your Mac, you need to get Xcode installed on your machine. Issue the following commands on the Terminal:

xcode-select --install

If you get the following output, then you are ready for the next series of steps:

xcode-select: error: command line tools are already installed, use "Software Update" to install updates

HomeBrew is a package management software tool that allows you to easily install Unix tools that don't come shipped with the macOS.

If you don't already have it on your machine, you can install it by issuing the following command in a Terminal:

 /user/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

After that, you should issue yet another set of commands to get Qt installed via the Terminal:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/fdfc724dd532345f5c6cdf47dc43e99654e6a5fd/Formula/qt5.rb

brew install ./qt5.rb

In a few chapters' time, we will be working with the MySql database. To configure Qt 5 with MySql, issue the following command:

brew install ./qt5 --with-mysql

This command should take a while to complete and, assuming nothing goes wrong, you are ready to write Qt programs.