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

Designing the application menu

Most applications organize functionality into a hierarchical menu system, typically displayed at the top of the application or screen (depending on the operating system). While the organization of this menu varies between operating systems, certain items are fairly common across platforms.

Of these common items, our application will need the following:

  • A File menu containing file operations such as Open/Save/Export, and often an option to quit the application. Our users will need this menu to select a file to save to, and to quit the program.
  • An Options menu where users can configure the application. We'll need this menu for our toggle settings; sometimes a menu like this is called Preferences or Settings, but we'll go with Options for now.
  • A Help menu, which contains links to help documentation, or, at the very least, an About message giving the basic information about the application. We'll implement this menu...