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• Author: Ken Martin, Bill Hoffman
• Publisher: Kitware, Inc.
• Publish Date: February 5, 2008
• ISBN: 1930934203
• Pages: 385

The driving force behind my decision to learn CMake was KDE4. I came from Free Software/Open Source background rather than Kitware fabulous VTK/ITK/whatever-else-TK world so I expected to learn how to use Cmake in FLOSS perspective, too. Besides this, I usually read techbooks in S-trains and airplanes during my journeys - it's a part of hobby and self-education for me. So "Mastering Cmake, 4th Edition" is not bad, but it's just not this type of the book.

First of all, let me mention that this title is among the very few without Amazon-specific discount and (compared to other CS books) it's not cheap. The book itself is printed on a very good paper and there is even errata sheet inside it. All these shows that publishers were trying to make the publication as accurate as possible (despite there best attempts, there are several glitches in the text like missed parentheses or mis-formatted code; although being responsible for the magazine production for 3 years, I consider them as almost-inevitable). About forty percent of the book is CMake Reference Documentation and I don't see much reason for putting it here because it's available over the Internet and in the CMake distribution itself.

The text is much more like detailed documentation than a tutorial (although Chapter 12 is totally devoted to one simple tutorial project, I'd prefer to see this scattered over book). Qt4/KDE4 are mentioned only briefly (I don't mean CMake commands for this libraries, I mean the tutorials again) although you can easily learn everything you need by yourself after reading the book. CMake coverage is thorough but there is a very little beyond it; where famous Autotools book can be described as "introduction to cross-platform development with Autoconf, Automake and friends", this one is more like "CMake syntax & usage for those who already develops cross-platform". Sometimes, the authors resort to "how" something should be done instead of "why". The wording is not very entertaining (but certainly is better than mine) but this hardly should be considered as drawback for the tech book.

So, to conclude: a bit tough to read, more of documentation than of tutorial, but provides a fairy complete coverage on CMake syntax, usage (including cross-compiling and testing) and inner-working.

Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123