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

Python's class system


A class can be thought of as a way of assigning a name to a set of specific functions and variables that are all associated with a common piece of an application.

The code for a class differs in two main ways from regular Python code.

Firstly, you will see the class keyword before the name of the class, followed by a colon and an indented scope. This is the syntax for telling Python that everything within this scope belongs to the class.

Secondly, all functions defined will have self as their first argument (unless they are static or class methods). This is automatically passed in via Python itself and so will cause calls to the function to appear to need one fewer argument than the definition.

The purpose of the self argument is to give each function (which, when in the scope of a class, is known as a method instead) access to the instance's other attributes and methods.

Certain types of variables called attributes are available when using classes. Attributes function as...