This is the release repository of the free version of Qt6 QML For Beginners, published by Daniel Gakwaya.

Fluid and Dynamic User Interfaces for Desktop, Mobile and Embedded

• The full copy of the book is officially available online, for a price.
• This repository offers an open, free version of the book only containing 5 chapters, out of the original 13 in the book.
• We regularly publish discount coupons for the book in our newsletter. If interested, you should subscribe. You will also get a free copy of our Qt Creator booklet.
• To download the book, click on Releases and pick the latest release.

• Chapter 1, First Steps with Qt QML, provides a brief introduction to Qt and QML, describes how to get Qt and Qt Creator installed on your host system and guides you through the process of building and understanding the building blocks of your first QML application.

• Chapter 2, Dissecting the QML Syntax, explores the QML syntax, guides you through the process of using QML basic QML data types in a live QML application, and introduces you to property bindings. It also gets your feet wet using property handlers and explores some features of the Qt global object.

• Chapter 3, Basic QML Elements, explores the QML elements: Item, Rectangle, Image and Text. It also shows you how you can compose these basic, built-in QML elements to build your own custom QML components.

• Chapter 4, Signals and Handlers, introduces the signals and slots mechanism in QML. It explores several facilities at our disposal, helping us communicate between different QML objects.

• Chapter 5, User Input, navigates through the user input facilities provided by QML, helping you add interactivity to your QML applications.

• Chapter 6, JavaScript, sheds more light on where and how JavaScript is used in your QML code.

• Chapter 7, Positioning, explores the positioning mechanisms offered by QML. We look at anchors, positioners, layouts and a few others.

• Chapter 8, Qt Quick Controls, provides a live and practical walkthrough of the Qt Quick Controls module, covering the most common controls like Button, Slider, SwipeView, Flickable and many others. They are pre-built QML components helping you build reliable and good-looking user interfaces relatively fast.

• Chapter 9, Dialogs, introduces to you common dialog types for use in your QML applications and explores how to build your own custom dialogs. It also shows you ways you can use built-in Qt Creator examples as a base and build your own modern-looking dialogs.

• Chapter 10, The Model View Architecture, explores how you can leverage the model-view architecture constructs in Qt and QML, to separate the way your data is stored from the way it is visualized. This architectural approach promotes code reusability, maintainability, and flexibility. By decoupling the model, view, and delegate, you can independently modify and update each component, resulting in scalable and responsive applications.

• Chapter 11, Transforms, Animations, States and Transitions, walks you through some of the most powerful tools that help bring your QML user interfaces to life. Transforms are used to apply different visual transformations like rotation, scaling, and translation to items. Animations allow you to create smooth and dynamic transitions between property values over time. States and Transitions in QML facilitate defining different sets of property values and defining how these properties change when transitioning between states.

• Chapter 12, Networking, explores some of the built-in networking facilities that come with QML. We will use the XMLHttpRequest object to download both raw HTML and JSON data from the web. We will do the plumbing necessary for downloaded data to be displayed in a QML user interface.

• Chapter 13, Storage, guides you through facilities that help in persisting data on the local device. We’ll look at the Settings object and the LocalStorage module.

There is no magic pill you can take to consume the knowledge in this book. One needs to take the time to read the content and make sure to try the code in Qt Creator. Once you have the thing running on your host computer, you can then try to change things a bit, read the docs to see if you can figure some other things out on your own. The book is not meant to give you everything. And it really can’t! It’s meant to get you started and help you pick up some momentum. Once you have the basics under your belt, and have a few applications running, you can even try to use the knowledge to build things I didn’t necessarily do in the book, for example, why not build a calculator app, or a calory tracker, or really anything that happens to pick your interest. The more of these things you do the more momentum you’ll be picking up and who knows where you’ll end up? Here is a rule I try to follow these days: "Try to spend 20% of the time learning and consuming new knowledge and 80% of the time using the knowledge to build stuff."

Daniel Gakwaya is a Senior Software Engineer at Blikoon Technologies. He has been writing software since 2011 and Qt is one of his favorite frameworks. Many of his cross-platform Qt-based projects are completed and out there on the market. Autodidact by nature, he has a passion for learning new things and loves sharing knowledge with others. Especially people new to the dark art of software development.