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

Command line versus GUI


Since we now have a working game, what is the motivation to continue with this project? Isn't the command-line interface good enough for a lot of games?

Let's briefly compare the suitability of command-line interfaces versus graphical interfaces for Python programs.

Interactivity

When creating a program which runs on the command line, there are essentially only two ways to get input from the user.

The first is by parsing command-line arguments. These are the extra information written on the same line when running an executable from the command line. For example: python3 -i blackjack.py. Here, we  have passed in a flag of -i telling the interpreter to end in interactive mode, and the filename blackjack.py.

The second is the one which we have used throughout our blackjack game – input. The input function allows the user to type anything in to the command line and returns this as a string. As you may have noticed from our constant need to use the lower function and a while...