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
Other Books You May Enjoy
20
Index
Appendices

Separating concerns

Proper architectural design is essential for any project that needs to scale. Anyone can prop up some studs and build a garden shed, but a house or skyscraper takes careful planning and engineering. Software is no different; simple scripts can get away with shortcuts such as global variables or manipulating class properties directly, but as the program grows, our code needs to isolate and encapsulate different functionalities in a way that limits the amount of complexity we need to understand at any given moment.

We call this concept separation of concerns, and it's accomplished through the use of architectural patterns that describe different application components and how they interact.

The MVC pattern

Probably the most enduring of these architectural patterns is the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, which was introduced in the 1970s. While this pattern has evolved and spun off variations over the years, the basic gist remains: keep the data...