Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints: Master GUI programming in Tkinter as you design, implement, and deliver 10 real-world applications

by Bhaskar Chaudhary

Master GUI programming in Tkinter as you design, implement, and deliver ten real-world applications from start to finish

About This BookConceptualize and build state-of-art GUI applications with TkinterTackle the complexity of just about any size GUI application with a structured and scalable approachA project-based, practical guide to get hands-on into Tkinter GUI developmentWho This Book Is ForSoftware developers, scientists, researchers, engineers, students, or programming hobbyists with basic familiarity in Python will find this book interesting and informative. People familiar with basic programming constructs in other programming language can also catch up with some brief reading on Python. No GUI programming experience is expected.

What You Will LearnGet to know the basic concepts of GUI programming, such as Tkinter top-level widgets, geometry management, event handling, using callbacks, custom styling, and dialogsCreate apps that can be scaled in size or complexity without breaking down the coreWrite your own GUI framework for maximum code reuseBuild apps using both procedural and OOP styles, understanding the strengths and limitations of both stylesLearn to structure and build large GUI applications based on Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectureBuild multithreaded and database-driven appsCreate apps that leverage resources from the networkLearn basics of 2D and 3D animation in GUI applicationsDevelop apps that can persist application data with object serialization and tools such as configparserIn DetailTkinter 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.

Style and approachAn easy-to-follow guide, full of hands-on examples of real-world GUI programs. The first chapter is a must read as it explains most of the things you need to get started with writing GUI programs with Tkinter. Each subsequent chapter is a stand-alone project that discusses some aspects of GUI programming in detail. These chapters can be read sequentially or randomly depending upon the readers experience with Python.

342 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 30, 2015

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.