Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By: Bhaskar Chaudhary

Overview of this book

Tkinter is the built-in GUI package that comes with standard Python distributions. It is a cross-platform package, which means you build once and deploy everywhere. It is simple to use and intuitive in nature, making it suitable for programmers and non-programmers alike. This book will help you master the art of GUI programming. It delivers the bigger picture of GUI programming by building real-world, productive, and fun applications such as a text editor, drum machine, game of chess, audio player, drawing application, piano tutor, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and much more. In every project, you will build on the skills acquired in the previous project and gain more expertise. You will learn to write multithreaded programs, network programs, database-driven programs, asyncio based programming and more. You will also get to know the modern best practices involved in writing GUI apps. With its rich source of sample code, you can build upon the knowledge gained with this book and use it in your own projects in the discipline of your choice.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

What this book covers

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, Making a Text Editor, develops a text editor using 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 writing multithreaded GUI applications.

Chapter 4, Game of Chess, introduces the 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. In addition, it introduces readers to the power of the Tkinter Canvas widget.

Chapter 5, Building an Audio Player, covers 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, Piano Tutor, demonstrates how to represent the given domain information using JSON and then apply the data thus created to create an interactive application. It also discusses the concept of program responsiveness and how to handle it with Tkinter.

Chapter 8, Fun with Canvas, is dedicated to harnessing the powerful visualization capabilities of Tkinter's canvas widget. It looks at examples from several important mathematical domains to build different kinds of useful and beautiful simulations.

Chapter 9, 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, asynchronous programming, and multithreaded programming.

Chapter 10, 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.