Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints: Build Real-World High-Performance Applications By Using Python 3.7

by Bhaskar Chaudhary

Master GUI programming in Tkinter as you design, implement, and deliver ten real-world applications from start to finish Tkinter is the built-in GUI package that comes with standard Python distributions. It is a cross-platform package, which means you build once and deploy everywhere. It is simple to use and intuitive in nature, making it suitable for programmers and non-programmers alike. This book will help you master the art of GUI programming. It delivers the bigger picture of GUI programming by building real-world, productive, and fun applications such as a text editor, drum machine, game of chess, media player, drawing application, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and many more. In every project, you will build on the skills acquired in the previous project and gain more expertise. You will learn to write multithreaded programs, network programs, database driven programs and more. You will also get to know the modern best practices involved in writing GUI apps. With its rich source of sample code, you can build upon the knowledge gained with this book and use it in your own projects in the discipline of your choice.

422 pages, Paperback

Published March 20, 2018

Reviews

[Victor · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book explains the use of Tkinter through examples. It reads like a blog, there are many examples, and sometimes it goes very deep into content that is not necessarily tkinter.
I suggest that a software architecture book is read instead of this one. Read this one if curious, or as an intermediate python programmer looking for ideas on what you can do.
Thinking about programming overall, it might be worth checking something more web-oriented than desktop applications (as this book).

[R Silver · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a strange book. I’m a pretty decent programmer, I’ve played around in Python, JavaScript, and c++ for a bit and I have cyber security experience. On the back of the book, it explains that this book is for “programmers and non-programmers alike”. If you look at the project list below the first paragraph on the back of the book, you’ll see projects like building a drum machine and a port scanner. I wouldn’t open up this book if I considered myself a non-programmer.

You open the book to the preface and it states who the book is for: “Devs, scientists, researchers, engineers, students, and programming hobbyist”. I believe this is the core issue with that book. The first project is almost “hello world” easy, the second project is to create 21 widgets just to see how they work (over 90 lines of code, I ran the code listed on the GitHub for the book and it brought up errors), and the third project is only 10 lines long. It’s odd. It appears like there wasn’t outside eyes/editing on this project at all.

There are spelling errors which normally would just be distracting but do to how the book is organized, the spelling errors contribute to the overall ambiguity of the book. It’s difficult to figure out what the author wants you to learn and what the overall point is. You’ll have code examples that are on the exact same topic of what you’re learning that don’t relate to the examples they’re showing. They intentionally used different examples than the code they literally decided to put into the book. Why host your code online and then randomly put code into your book that won’t even deploy unless you already knew how to finish the program?

Honestly, I was so surprised by the book that I decided to check out another TKinter book that Python recommends on their website and that book was much easier to understand. I think this book fails at its objective to clearly teach TKinter and I found the documentation page more enlightening than what I found in this book.