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)

Layout Management

In this chapter, we will explore how to arrange widgets within widgets to create a Python GUI. Learning about the fundamentals of GUI layout design will allow us to create great-looking GUIs. There are certain techniques that will help us achieve this layout design.

The grid layout manager is one of the most important layout tools that we will be using, and is built into tkinter. We can very easily create menu bars, tabbed controls (that is, Notebooks), and many more widgets using tkinter.

By completing this chapter, you will learn how to arrange your widgets to make your GUI look truly great! Learning layout management is fundamental to GUI design, even if you use other programming languages – but Python truly rocks!

The following screenshot provides an overview of the Python modules that will be used in this chapter:

In this chapter, we will lay out...