Introduction to Qt

Qt (pronounced cute) has been used by software engineers and developers for more than two decades to create cross-platform applications since its first release. After several changes of ownership and numerous major code overhauls, Qt has become even more feature rich and supports even more platforms than it used to. Qt not only excels in desktop application development, but is also excellent for both mobile and embedded systems development.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics :

• What is Qt?
• Why use Qt?
• Using tools in Qt
• Downloading and installing Qt
• Setting up a working environment
• Running our first Hello World Qt program

Throughout this chapter, we will learn more about the history of Qt. Then, we'll proceed to build our first example program using the latest version of Qt, which is Qt version 5. For the convenience of our readers, we will simply refer to it as Qt throughout the book.