Chapter 1, Meet Tkinter, begins from scratch, providing an overview of Tkinter and covering details of how to create root windows, add widgets to a root window, handle layout with geometry managers, and work with events.

Chapter 2, Make a Text Editor, develops a text editor in the procedural style of programming. It gives readers their first taste of several features of Tkinter and what it is like to develop a real application.

Chapter 3, Programmable Drum Machine, uses object-oriented programming to develop a drum machine that is capable of playing user-composed rhythms. The application can also save compositions and later edit or replay them. Here, you will learn the techniques of designing a GUI application using a model-first philosophy and how to write multithreaded GUI applications.

Chapter 4, A Game of Chess, introduces key aspects of structuring a GUI application using the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. It also teaches the art of taking a real-world object (chess) and modeling it in the notations that your program can manipulate. It also introduces readers to the power of the Tkinter Canvas widget.

Chapter 5, Building an Audio Player, introduces the concepts of working with external libraries while showing you how to work with many different Tkinter widgets. Most importantly, it shows how to make your own Tkinter widgets, thereby extending the capabilities of the Tkinter manifold.

Chapter 6, Paint Application, looks at the Tkinter Canvas widget in detail. As you will see, the Canvas widget is truly a highlight of Tkinter. The chapter also introduces the concept of the GUI framework, thereby creating reusable code for all your future programs.

Chapter 7, Multiple Fun Projects, works through a series of small but functional projects, demonstrating problems from different domains such as animation, network programming, socket programming, database programming, making graphs, and multithreaded programming.

Chapter 8, Miscellaneous Tips, discusses some vital aspects of GUI programming that, though not covered in the previous chapters, form a common theme in many GUI programs.

The programs discussed in this book have been developed on the Ubuntu platform. However, given the multiplatform abilities of Tkinter, you can easily work along on other platforms such as Windows, Mac OS, and other distributions of Linux.

For this book, you will require Python version 3.4 with Tkinter 8.6 in most parts of the distribution. The links to download and install other project-specific modules and software are mentioned in the respective chapters.

Software developers, scientists, researchers, engineers, students, and programming hobbyists with a basic familiarity with Python will find this book interesting and informative. A motivated Python newbie with a background in writing programs can fill in the gaps of knowledge with a little outside research.

People familiar with basic programming constructs in other programming languages can also catch up with some brief reading on Python. No GUI programming experience is expected.

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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The reset_to_initial_locations() method initializes all the chess piece locations to reflect the starting position of the game."

A block of code is set as follows:

def toggle_play_button_state(self):
    if self.now_playing:
        self.play_button.config(state="disabled")
    else:
        self.play_button.config(state="normal")

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

def on_loop_button_toggled(self):
    self.loop = self.to_loop.get()
    self.keep_playing = self.loop
    if self.now_playing:
        self.now_playing = self.loop
    self.toggle_play_button_state()

Any command-line input on the Python interactive shell is written as follows:

>>> import pyglet
>>> help(pyglet.media)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "When a user clicks on the Cancel button, we simply want the settings window to close."

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