Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook: Building responsive and powerful cross-platform applications with PyQt

by B.M. Harwani

Over 60 recipes to help you design interactive, smart, and cross-platform GUI applications PyQt is one of the best cross-platform interface toolkits currently available; it's stable, mature, and completely native. If you want control over all aspects of UI elements, PyQt is what you need. This book will guide you through every concept necessary to create fully functional GUI applications using PyQt, with only a few lines of code. As you expand your GUI using more widgets, you will cover networks, databases, and graphical libraries that greatly enhance its functionality. Next, the book guides you in using Qt Designer to design user interfaces and implementing and testing dialogs, events, the clipboard, and drag and drop functionality to customize your GUI. You will learn a variety of topics, such as look and feel customization, GUI animation, graphics rendering, implementing Google Maps, and more. Lastly, the book takes you through how Qt5 can help you to create cross-platform apps that are compatible with Android and iOS. You will be able to develop functional and appealing software using PyQt through interesting and fun recipes that will expand your knowledge of GUIs If you’re an intermediate Python programmer wishing to enhance your coding skills by writing powerful GUIs in Python using PyQT, this is the book for you.

Genres: Programming

426 pages, eBook Kindle

Published July 30, 2018

Reviews

[Wen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author presented the use of PyQt Designer with simple examples and the codes are reasonably easy to follow. The examples have real-world uses. This helps to match real-world needs with the recipes.
However, I learn more from the book by troubleshooting the sample codes.
Many of the codes in the book are either wrongly indented or have missing parts. Thankfully, the codes bundle is all working. The naming convention of functions, variables and other modules are not consistent throughout the book. I am not sure why the author did not adopt a more pythonic way of formating strings with {} and .format.

Overall, it is a good book to quickly learn the basics of PyQt Designer. I hope the author can update the eBook to amend the errors.

[Jshamberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

To be Brief in my thoughts:

This book is a great way to dive head first into PyQt5 and learn how to utilize the QDesigner application. However, be warned that there are a variety of errors in the book specifically within code formatting.

Go slowly through this book, and try the examples. Google and the Python community will help you in problem solving. It can be a decent way to learn.

I would say the biggest failing of this book is that it doesn't show you how to bring things together. I could have used an example of an application with multiple dialog's/windows. The use of the MdiArea could have been explored further and in more detail.

[Eric Mesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the plus side, this book gave me the knowledge I needed to finally complete a GUI for my Extra Life Donation tracker program (https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonation...). I'd tried many different GUI toolkits and none of them was getting me what I wanted. I wanted to use QT since I love using KDE, but it was just too complicated and free posts on various blogs didn't quite take me far enough. So for that I'm grateful to this book. There are also future improvements I'll be able to make to my code thanks to this book.

However, I did have to knock off two stars for two related reasons involving errors. The first one is annoying if you don't know what you're doing, but it's not the end of the world - there are times where he tells you the text to write on a button or a label and it doesn't match the screenshot in the book. Like the text says to have the button say "Go" and the screenshot says "Click Me". It's not a big deal as long as you're consistent in the code. What is worse is that there are MANY indentation errors here. And Python is a language where indentation matters! It, not curly braces, is what determines when code blocks start and end. So the reader constantly has to be asking themselves if this indentation makes sense and then adapting their code if it gets a runtime error.

I usually don't come across errors like these in O'Reilly or Starch Press programming books, but on reddit the Pakt books have a bad reputation. Perhaps this is why. So, it's very useful (especially being the cookbook style book), but reader beware of following the examples blindly.

[Kain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pod pewnymi względami spełniła moje oczekiwania, pod innymi nie.
Fajnie byłoby znaleźć coś bardziej zaawansowanego z wykorzystaniem QT Designera, bo po pewnym czasie w książce mamy już tylko używanie labeli, buttonów itp. No i nie zawsze faktycznie skupia się na qt, tylko np. jest gdzieś obok -> "no to poznamy lekko sqlite, i wykorzystamy tak tylko przy okazji qt zupełnie nie wprowadzając nic nowego z tytułowej biblioteki".
Fajnie za to, że na końcu jest o programowaniu na androida, choć nie wiem co to ma do rzeczy z qt, jeśli wykorzystujemy kivy.
All in all, warta uwagi jak na wprowadzenie do qt, gorzej potem.

[Juan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction to PyQt5. Can be used as a reference book. This edition has several typos in some code examples.

[Tiago Adrião · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to PyQt5 for a begginer user and good examples to try some modules.

It should have more examples or some description of all the modules.

But besides that it is a great book!