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)

Dynamically expanding the GUI using widgets

You may have noticed from the previous screenshots and by running the preceding code that the widgets can extend themselves to take up as much space as they need in order to visually display their text.

Java introduced the concept of dynamic GUI layout management. In comparison, visual development IDEs, such as VS.NET, lay out the GUI in a visual manner, and basically hard-code the x and y coordinates of the UI elements.

Using tkinter, this dynamic capability creates both an advantage and a little bit of a challenge because, sometimes, our GUI dynamically expands when we would like it not to be so dynamic! Well, we are dynamic Python programmers, so we can figure out how to make the best use of this fantastic behavior!

Getting ready

...