Book Image

Mastering GUI Programming with Python

By : Alan D. Moore
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering GUI Programming with Python

5 (2)
By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

PyQt5 has long been the most powerful and comprehensive GUI framework available for Python, yet there is a lack of cohesive resources available for Python programmers to learn how to use it. This book will be your comprehensive guide to exploring GUI development with PyQt5. You will get started with an introduction to PyQt5, before going on to develop stunning GUIs with modern features. You will learn how to build forms using QWidgets and delve into important aspects of GUI development such as layouts, size policies, and event-driven programming. Moving ahead, you’ll discover PyQt5’s most powerful features through chapters on audio-visual programming with QtMultimedia, database-driven software with QtSQL, and web browsing with QtWebEngine. Next, in-depth coverage of multithreading and asynchronous programming will help you run tasks asynchronously and build high-concurrency processes with ease. In later chapters, you’ll gain insights into QOpenGLWidget, along with mastering techniques for creating 2D graphics with QPainter. You’ll also explore PyQt on a Raspberry Pi and interface it with remote systems using QtNetwork. Finally, you will learn how to distribute your applications using setuptools and PyInstaller. By the end of this book, you will have the skills you need to develop robust GUI applications using PyQt.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Deep Dive into PyQt
8
Section 2: Working with External Resources
12
Section 3: Unraveling Advanced Qt Implementations
22
Upgrading Raspbian 9 to Raspbian 10

Creating a PyQt application template

hello_world.py demonstrated the bare minimum of code to get a Qt window on the screen, but it's a bit too simplistic to serve as a model for more complex applications. In this book, we're going to be creating many PyQt applications, so, to make things easier, we're going to compose a basic application template. Future chapters will refer to this template, so make sure to create it exactly as specified.

Open a new file called qt_template.py, and add in these imports:

import sys
from PyQt5 import QtWidgets as qtw
from PyQt5 import QtGui as qtg
from PyQt5 import QtCore as qtc

We'll start with importing sys, so that we can pass QApplication an actual list of script arguments; then we'll import our three main Qt modules. To save some typing, while avoiding star imports, we're going to alias them to abbreviated names...