Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

By : Alan D. Moore
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

4.5 (2)
By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is widely used to build GUIs in Python due to its simplicity. In this book, you’ll discover Tkinter’s strengths and overcome its challenges as you learn to develop fully featured GUI applications. Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, Second Edition, will not only provide you with a working knowledge of the Tkinter GUI library, but also a valuable set of skills that will enable you to plan, implement, and maintain larger applications. You’ll build a full-blown data entry application from scratch, learning how to grow and improve your code in response to continually changing user and business needs. You’ll develop a practical understanding of tools and techniques used to manage this evolving codebase and go beyond the default Tkinter widget capabilities. You’ll implement version control and unit testing, separation of concerns through the MVC design pattern, and object-oriented programming to organize your code more cleanly. You’ll also gain experience with technologies often used in workplace applications, such as SQL databases, network services, and data visualization libraries. Finally, you’ll package your application for wider distribution and tackle the challenge of maintaining cross-platform compatibility.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
19
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20
Index
Appendices

An overview of basic Tkinter

As exciting as it may be to see that first GUI window pop up on the screen, "Hello World" is not a terribly interesting application. Let's start again and dig a little deeper into Tkinter as we build a slightly larger program. Since the next chapter will see you landing a job at a fictitious agricultural laboratory studying fruit plants, let's create a little program to gauge your opinions about bananas.

Building a GUI with Tkinter widgets

Start a new file in your editor called banana_survey.py, and begin by importing tkinter like so:

# banana_survey.py
"""A banana preferences survey written in Python with Tkinter"""
import tkinter as tk

As with hello_tkinter.py, we need to create a root window before we can create any widgets or other Tkinter objects:

root = tk.Tk()

Once again, we've called this object root. The root window can be configured in various ways; for example,...