Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a modular, cross-platform application development toolkit for Python. When developing GUI-rich applications, the most important choices are which programming language(s) and which GUI framework to use. Python and Tkinter prove to be a great combination. This book will get you familiar with Tkinter by having you create fun and interactive projects. These projects have varying degrees of complexity. We'll start with a simple project, where you'll learn the fundamentals of GUI programming and the basics of working with a Tkinter application. After getting the basics right, we'll move on to creating a project of slightly increased complexity, such as a highly customizable Python editor. In the next project, we'll crank up the complexity level to create an instant messaging app. Toward the end, we'll discuss various ways of packaging our applications so that they can be shared and installed on other machines without the user having to learn how to install and run Python programs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


With this, our Hello World application has taught us all we should need to know with regard to basic GUI functionality. We have learned how to spawn a window containing various GUI elements by utilizing Tkinter's built-in widgets. We can place these widgets into the window using special functions called geometry managers, of which we have three to choose from.

The messagebox module allows us to easily convey information to the user without having to use any widgets within our main window, and can also be used to get feedback from a user and control how our window will behave.

We've added three simple, but effective widgets to our arsenal (not including the main window): the Label, for displaying static information; the Button, which allows a user to execute functions by clicking on it; and the Entry, which gathers textual information and allows for its use by our applications.

Next on our agenda is something a little different—a game of blackjack! By writing this game, we will also cover a very common starting point among programmers interested in GUI development: having a command-line application which could be improved by becoming a graphical one. In order to do this, we will briefly step back to the world of the CLI.