The aim of this book is to introduce you to developing GUI applications in an easy way. Python is easy to learn and use, and its programs are relatively short compared to those written in any other programming languages, such as C++, and Java. It is supported by a large set of dynamic libraries and bindings that make it efficient to develop very complex applications in an efficient manner. This book will introduce you to user interface programming and its components. You will be able to develop real-time applications in a shorter time after reading this book. The second edition.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with PySide, introduces you to GUI programming in general. This chapter takes you through the introduction of PySide and its installation in various major operating systems, followed by a short introduction to exception handling in programming. By the end of this chapter, users will know how to install and use PySide to create GUI applications in Python.
Chapter 2, Entering through Windows, introduces you to all the GUI programming that revolves around Windows. This chapter explains the basic methods of creating windows and adding some functions to them. By the end of this chapter, users will be familiar with how to create windows and modify them accordingly.
Chapter 3, Main Windows and Layout Management, elaborates further on the previous chapter by explaining how to create menus and tool bars for a windowed application. This also explains layout management policies. A simple text editor is given as an example at the end of the chapter. By the end of this chapter, readers have an experience of creating a real-time application in PySide.
Chapter 4, Events and Signals, this chapter goes on to explain the signals, various text and graphic effects, drag and drop, and a few geometrical diagram shapes. By the end of this chapter, readers will learn about managing events and various other text and graphical effects.
Chapter 5, Dialogs and Widgets, details the built-in dialog boxes for applications, introduces how to create customized dialogs, and then takes a look at the various widgets that are available in PySide. By the end of this chapter, you will learn about creating your own customized widgets and dialogs.
Chapter 6, Database Handling, explains how connecting to a database is evident for almost all applications. This chapter is dedicated to explaining how to connect to a database and execute queries on it. It also deals with the presentation of data in table and form views. By the end of this chapter, you will know more about interacting with databases and viewing data from them.
To execute the examples that are provided in this book, you will require a standard installation of Python v2.6 or later, including Python v3.4, and PySide v1.0.7 or later. A good text editor application, such as Sublime Text, will also help in writing Python programs in an IDE environment.
Are you a GUI developer or fascinated by GUI programming? Bored with writing several lines of code to create a simple button in GUI? Then this book is for you. This book is written for Python programmers to try their hands at GUI programming. Even if you are new to Python but have some programming experience with any of the object-oriented languages, you will be able to easily pick it up as Python is easy to learn.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "The import pyside command should not return any errors".
A block of code is set as follows:
# Import required modules import sys, time from PySide.QtGui import * from PySide.QtCore import *
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
brew install pyside port-install pyXX-pyside
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "On clicking Next in the subsequent windows, and finally clicking Finish".
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