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

Writing cross-platform Python


At the time of writing, Python is supported on over three dozen operating system platforms, covering everything from common desktop systems like Windows to high-end commercial Unixes to obscure OS projects such as Haiku or AROS Research Operating System. Across all these platforms, most Python code works without any significant alteration, as Python has been designed to translate high-level functionality into appropriate low-level operations on each one. Even so, there are situations where OS differences cannot be (or simply have not been) abstracted away, and careful handling is required to avoid platform-specific failures.

In this section, we'll look at some of the larger issues that impact cross-platform Python.

Filenames and filepaths across platforms

Filesystems are probably the biggest source of pitfalls for cross-platform development. Although most platforms share the concept of files and directories arranged in a hierarchy, there are some crucial differences...