Obtaining and Compiling the Libraries

Because the exact compilation instructions can change between releases, this book won't attempt to document them precisely. You should obtain the latest stable release of both GTK+ and Gnome from http://www.gtk.org/ and http://www.gnome.org, respectively, and follow the instructions that come with the distribution.

It's a very good idea to compile the GTK+ and Gnome libraries yourself, for several reasons:

• You should have the source code around, to learn from and to refer to when documentation is lacking.

• You should compile with debugging switched on, so preconditions and assertions will be triggered if you try to use the library incorrectly. Most prebuilt binaries will turn these checks off for efficiency.

• You will probably want unstripped libraries, so you can see function names and so on in your debugger.