I have been wrestling with X for a while and I am looking for a good documentation resource.

The man pages have been extraordinarily helpful for functions, and source code from others has been a huge help for design and logic, but I am looking for more.

Descriptions of the events would be very helpful; the names of events and when they are fired, that kind of thing, and descriptions of the data types would be helpful as well.

Is there a place that covers these kinds of topics? Are there any good full-fledged resources on X at all?

http://x.holovko.ru/Xlib/contents.html

May not really be what you're looking for, but it's better than nothing. I too pray for MSDN quality documentation sometimes.

Instead of using X directly, why don't you consider using an API like QT or GTK+? They're layered on top of X and they are higher-level of abstraction and also they have good documentation too.

Especially QT is very good if you've come from a Windows background.

I disagree. Knowing low-level xlib knowledge is extrememly useful, even when using high-level toolkits like QT/gtk. It's like knowing the raw win32 api will make you a better windows programmer overall even when working on high-level languages/libraries like VB or MFC.

Exactly. But in Windows API, the documentation in MSDN is as good as the documentation for MFC and VB. But in Linux, the documentation is not so good for the lower level APIs as you yourself admitted. So if you want to get things done quickly, you can start using a higher level API and then when you want to use something directly in the lower level API, you can look up the documentation.

Nobody writes full-fledged Windows applications in C any more. They use MFC and C++. I think similarly, writing X apps is not the way to go unless you want to target users on all DEs and WMs.

The whole idea of using xlib directly is to understand the whole client/server architecture of X. Learning a high-level toolkit will not give you that big picture.

And not true abt apps not written in C. Many OSS windows projects are in fact in plain C. eg the mame emulator.

Thanks for the link! That's a much better resource than I could find.