Add a preface instead of an introduction

Make the Cookbook look more like a book than a tutorial.
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Emmanuele Bassi 2008-12-11 16:58:07 +00:00
parent 35627f240f
commit 135cb5c6e2

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@ -32,24 +32,76 @@
</bookinfo> <!-- }}} -->
<chapter id="introduction"> <!-- {{{ -->
<title>Introduction</title>
<title>Preface</title>
<epigraph>
<attribution>The Perl Cookbook</attribution>
<para>Let me show you that easy way, so others may easily follow.</para>
</epigraph>
<para>There is a wonderful simile in the preface of the <emphasis>Perl
Cookbook</emphasis>: approaching a programming problem is oftentimes
similar to balancing Columbus's egg. The initial difficulties of dealing
with, and more importantly solving, problems in the computer programming
field sometimes can sometimes only be overcome if somebody shows you how
to use a new tool. This is true for programming languages but also for
programming libraries.</para>
<para>This book has been written to try and give you a reference on
how to solve common issues that you might have to face when using
the Clutter toolkit.</para>
<para>This book is not meant to be a replacement for the API reference,
even though there will be descriptions of how Clutter works and how
its API looks like. We will require knowledge of the Clutter API, but
we will also point out where to find more information on the API that
examples have used.</para>
<para>Indeed, this book should be used as a companion to the API reference,
expanding the examples and showing how to achieve a specific result.</para>
<para>This is not a book for learning Clutter. This is also not a book
for learning C, or GObject or even GUI development.</para>
<para>Above all, this is a book for learning <emphasis>more</emphasis>
about Clutter, and about how to use it in the most efficient and easiest
way. It is meant to help you move past the basic usage of Clutter</para>
<para>This book is divided into chapters. Each chapter is dedicated to
a specific class, or a specific area. Each chapter starts with a short
introduction, followed by different <emphasis>recipes</emphasis>. Each
recipe has a problem, as a short statement describing what we want to
achieve; a solution, containing the source code; and a discussion
section, where the code is explained, where alternative approaches might
be usefule, caveats and references to the Clutter API for furher
studying.</para>
<para>This book, in the cookbook spirit, can be accessed mostly at
random.</para>
<section>
<title>About Clutter</title>
<para>FIXME</para>
<para>Clutter is an free and open source software library for creating
fast, visually rich and animated graphical user interfaces.</para>
<para>Clutter uses OpenGL (and, optionally, OpenGL ES on mobile and
embedded platforms) for rendering the user interface elements, but
at the same time it exposes an application program interface that hides
the underlying complexity of the OpenGL state machine from the
developer.</para>
<para>The program interface of Clutter is intended to be easy to use,
efficient, flexible and as self-documenting as possible.</para>
</section>
<section>
<title>About this document</title>
<para>This document tries to provide examples on how to perform some
common tasks when building an application or a toolkit using the
Clutter library.</para>
<para>This document is available in various formats like HTML,
text and PDF. The latest version is always available at
<ulink url="&docurl;">&docurl;</ulink>.</para>
</section>
<section>