Book Summary:

GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It's called the GIMP toolkit because it was originally written for developing the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), but GTK has now been used in a large number of software projects, including the GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) project.

GTK is built on top of GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) which is basically a wrapper around the low-level functions for accessing the underlying windowing functions (Xlib in the case of the X windows system), and gdk-pixbuf, a library for client-side image manipulation.

GTK is essentially an object oriented application programmers interface (API). Although written completely in C, it is implemented using the idea of classes and callback functions (pointers to functions).

There is also a third component called GLib which contains a few replacements for some standard calls, as well as some additional functions for handling linked lists, etc. The replacement functions are used to increase GTK's portability, as some of the functions implemented here are not available or are nonstandard on other Unixes such as g_strerror(). Some also contain enhancements to the libc versions, such as g_malloc() that has enhanced debugging utilities.

This tutorial describes the C interface to GTK. There are GTK bindings for many other languages including C++, Guile, Perl, Python, TOM, Ada95, Objective C, Free Pascal, Eiffel, Java and C#. If you intend to use another language's bindings to GTK, look at that binding's documentation first. In some cases that documentation may describe some important conventions (which you should know first) and then refer you back to this tutorial. There are also some cross-platform APIs (such as wxWindows and V) which use GTK as one of their target platforms; again, consult their documentation first.

This tutorial is an attempt to document as much as possible of GTK, but it is by no means complete. This tutorial assumes a good understanding of C, and how to create C programs. It would be a great benefit for the reader to have previous X programming experience, but it shouldn't be necessary.