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)

Creating self-testing code using Python's __main__ section

Python comes with a very nice feature that enables each module to self-test. Making use of this feature is a great way of making sure that the changes to our code do not break the existing code and, additionally, the __main__ self-testing section can serve as documentation for how each module works.

After a few months or years, we sometimes forget what our code is doing, so having an explanation written in the code itself is indeed of great benefit.

It is a good idea to always add a self-testing section to every Python module, when possible. It is sometimes not possible but, in most modules, it is possible to do so.

Getting ready

We will extend the previous recipe...