[CMake] Are the poor reviews of Mastering CMake Justified?

[Nagy-Egri Máté Ferenc]

Hi DJ,

I had the same feeling when I started out with CMake. Tutorials are generally of low quality, and the price of the book is steep. I asked a while back if there would be a digital version of it, that could come cheaper due to the lack of paper and distribution hassle, but Kitware said there is no intent on having a digital copy.

CMake however is a fine piece of software (not the best, but it gets the job done with a tolerable amount of frustration), and once you have it mastered, you can get serious *hit done in a matter of minutes. Even without cross-platform, dependency finding is alone worth it, not to mention unit tests built in.

As for learning, I would highly suggest reading CMake scripts of other projects, as there are some very nice scripts. SFML’s scripts are easy to read (though get complicated towards the end), and also some FindModule.cmake scripts (FindOpenCL.cmake that ships with CMake starting from version 3.0 is nice) are useful. After reading some scripts, cooking up some of your own isn’t hard.

Cheers,
Máté




Feladó: DJ
Elküldve: 2015. december 18., péntek 22:03
Címzett: cmake at cmake.org
Tárgy: [CMake] Are the poor reviews of Mastering CMake Justified?

I have only very recently encountered the need to use cmake. It seems 
this need came all at once out of the blue.

It appears to me that there is a general perception that good tutorial 
material is in short supply. I have followed various tutorials that are 
available online and find them less than stellar. I am mostly familiar 
with gnu toolchain stuff. I admit that I am biased here because my own 
work presents zero requirement for cross-platform builds. So far I find 
cmake documentation to be considerably inferior to gnu documentation, 
but that's just me.

This all led me to consider purchasing the book Mastering CMake. 
However, reviews on Amazon are generally very critical of the book. It 
is indeed expensive. Should I bother to shell out for it, or do others 
here share this negative evaluation of it? I don't want to waste my money.

Best,

- Jake -


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