Welcome!

Welcome to The Qt 6 Book - A book about QML. This text will guide you through QML, Qt's language for creating dynamic user interfaces.

I believe that the ability to build declarative, reactive, hardware accelerated user interfaces executing at native performance across all major platforms (and some not so major) is a game changer. When starting with Qt, it was almost as if I had my secret weapon to building software quickly. QML takes that to the next level.

How is this book different from the Qt documentation? I hear you ask. The intention is to build a complement. This book is meant as a book that you can read from front to back where each chapter builds on what you've previously learned. But it can also be used as a way for the experienced reader to get oriented in a new topic. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic and introduces the concepts from Qt and QML. However, the Qt documentation will always provide the full picture and is a great reference to look up the details about all elements, properties, enumerations, and more.

I wish you a pleasant read!

Johan Thelin

Structure

The book can be said to be split into three parts. The split is not clear cut enough to motivate a strict division of chapters, but more of a guideline that we've tried to follow when writing it.

The first few chapters, let's say until somewhere around chapter 5 - 7 can be considered an introduction. If you want to learn QML, you should make sure to read these chapters.

The following chapters, 6-14, can be seen as fairly separate chapters introducing independent topics, even though the models from chapter 7 are used in many more places. Feel free to dive into these in the order that you like and learn about the topics that you are curious about.

The remainder of the book focuses on more advanced topics such as details of JavaScript, mixing C++ and QML, and the Qt for Python bindings and QML. These are important topics and I really want you to read them. To build a full application with QML you need to understand these topics, but their main focus is not on QML.

Never Ending Work in Progress

The Qt 6 Book is a never ending work in progress. We welcome contributors and are planning to open up our infrastructure to let you contribute both by reporting issues and by contributing fixes and new content. The end goal is to present you with a printed book when the material has reached a maturity level that we are happy with, but we want to share this with you already now and to learn from your feedback what to improve, and what additional content to add.