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

Writing cross-platform Python

At the time of writing, Python is supported on nearly a dozen operating system platforms, covering everything from common desktop systems like Windows to high-end commercial Unixes like AIX and obscure OS projects such as Haiku OS.

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 system. 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 file paths 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...