Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By : Alan D. Moore
Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a lightweight, portable, and easy-to-use graphical toolkit available in the Python Standard Library, widely used to build Python GUIs due to its simplicity and availability. This book teaches you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly using the powerful combination of Python and Tkinter. After being introduced to Tkinter, you will be guided step-by-step through the application development process. Over the course of the book, your application will evolve from a simple data-entry form to a complex data management and visualization tool while maintaining a clean and robust design. In addition to building the GUI, you'll learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code to avoid errors, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. You'll make the most of Tkinter's cross-platform availability by learning how to maintain compatibility, mimic platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and confidence to design and build powerful high-end GUI applications to solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

SQL and relational database basics


Before we can start using PostgreSQL with Python, you'll need to have at least a basic understanding of SQL. If you already have one, you can skip to the next section; otherwise, brace yourself for a super-short crash course on relational databases and SQL.

For over three decades, relational database systems have remained a de-facto standard for storing business data. They are more commonly known as SQL databases, after the Structured Query Language (SQL) used to interact with them.

SQL databases are made up of tables. A table is something like our CSV file, in that it has rows representing individual items and columns representing data values associated with each item. A SQL table has some important differences from our CSV file. First, each column in the table is assigned a data type which is strictly enforced; just as Python will produce an error when you try to use abcd as an int, a SQL database will complain if you try to insert letters into a numeric...