## 1.7 About this manual

qThis userguide introduces the basics of XPCE/Prolog and its development environment. Chapter 2, ``Getting Started'' explains the interface. Chapter 3, ``Using the online manual'' introduces the online documentation tools. These are introduced early, as many of the examples in this manual introduce classes and methods without explaining them. The online manual tool can be used to find the definitions of these constructs quickly. The chapter 5 and chapter 4, ``Dialog (controller) windows'' and ``Simple Graphics'' introduce the various controller and graphical primitives.

With the material of the above described chapters, the user is sufficiently informed to create simple GUI's from predefined XPCE objects. The remaining chapters provide the background information and techniques that allow for the design of larger graphical systems.

Chapter 6, ``The relation between XPCE and Prolog'' is a brief intermezzo, explaining the relation between XPCE and Prolog data in more detail. Chapter 7, ``Defining classes'' explain the definition of new XPCE classes from Prolog and thus brings object-oriented programming to the user. Chapter 10, ``Programming techniques'' is an assorted collection of hints on how XPCE can be used to solve real-world problems elegantly. Chapter 11, ``Commonly used libraries'' documents some of the commonly used XPCE/Prolog libraries.

Chapter 12, ``Development and debugging tools'' introduces the XPCE debugger. The current debugger is powerful, but not very intuitive and requires a nice-looking front-end.

Of the appendices, appendix H is probably the most useful, providing a short description of each class and its relation to other classes. Many of the classes are accompanied with a small example.