Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Burkhard Meier
Book Image

Python GUI Programming Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Burkhard Meier

Overview of this book

Python is a multi-domain, interpreted programming language that is easy to learn and implement. With its wide support for frameworks to develop GUIs, you can build interactive and beautiful GUI-based applications easily using Python. This third edition of Python GUI Programming Cookbook follows a task-based approach to help you create effective GUIs with the smallest amount of code. Every recipe in this book builds upon the last to create an entire, real-life GUI application. These recipes also help you solve problems that you might encounter while developing GUIs. This book mainly focuses on using Python’s built-in tkinter GUI framework. You'll learn how to create GUIs in Python using simple programming styles and object-oriented programming (OOP). As you add more widgets and expand your GUI, you will learn how to connect to networks, databases, and graphical libraries that greatly enhance the functionality of your GUI. You’ll also learn how to use threading to ensure that your GUI doesn't become unresponsive. Toward the end, you’ll learn about the versatile PyQt GUI framework, which comes along with its own visual editor that allows you to design GUIs using drag and drop features. By the end of the book, you’ll be an expert in designing Python GUIs and be able to develop a variety of GUI applications with ease.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Writing our first PyQt5 GUI

In this recipe, we will be writing our first PyQt5 GUI. We will be using PyQt5 directly without using the Designer.

Getting ready

You need to have PyQt5 installed. See the Installing PyQt5 recipe to find out how to install PyQt5. Use your favorite Python editor to write the code. If you are not familiar with modern IDEs such as Eclipse, PyCharm, and so on, you can use the IDLE editor, which ships with Python.

How to do it...

Let's look at how we can build our first GUI with PyQt5:

  1. Open your favorite Python editor.
  2. Create a new Python module...