Writing programs for the X Window System can be a daunting task. One has to master event-driven programming, understand the asynchronous interactions between the X server and a client application, and learn to use several overlapping programming toolkits. A well-written, well-organized, and complete book with realistic sample applications would be an invaluable tool for aspiring X programmers. Unfortunately, this is not it.

The presentation starts with the lowest-level Xlib functions, then moves along to the higher-level Xt toolkit and the Xt-based Motif library. Each chapter suffers from a multitude of faults, however. The text is badly organized and often refers to crucial concepts that have been mentioned only in passing or not at all. The code is badly edited, and the sample code often declares library routines with the wrong types or the wrong number of arguments. In some places, examples use the wrong lines of code from the program, completely confounding whatever point was to be made. Most chapters include long lists of functions and features, with short descriptions of the functions that read like excerpts from a manual. Again, types and arguments are sometimes wrong.

Large parts of the book read as though they were written by rather than with a text editing program. For example, in the discussion of bitmaps in chapter 9, one example includes ten consecutive pages of hexadecimal numbers, the contents of a large bitmap. Clearly, it was easy to paste the code in from the original source, but it is hard to imagine anyone reading it, much less retyping it. Besides, it is one of the standard sample bitmap files distributed with X Windows, meaning X programmers will already have it online, something the authors fail to mention. Another example of the excess of cut and paste is that nearly every chapter ends with “The following MAKE file was used to process this program using SCO Open Desktop. The MAKE file for other X Window implementations varies.” (Actually, in chapter 11, the authors left out the second sentence.) This statement is followed by listings of make files that are all identical except for changing the program name from “example1” to “example2,” and so on, and a few typos in the comments. In every case, the indentation of the make files was lost in the process of typesetting, which means that none of the make files will work as printed.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone. The standard reference and tutorial for X programming remains the multivolume set published by O’Reilly [1–5] which, though lengthy, is readable, informative, and accurate.