Python and Tkinter Programming: Amazon.ca: John E Grayson Ph.D.: Books

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Books on graphical user interfaces (GUI) have an unfair advantage over typical computer books. Their contents have immediate positive impact on everything they touch, from the popularity of the underlying language to the careers of the developers they reach. Even mediocre GUI books have a beneficial impact.

John E. Grayson's deeply thought out, maturely written Python and Tkinter Programming does the double service of being a excellent object-oriented GUI book and communicating the standard for Tk-widget-based GUI development to the Python community. The short-term result will be a rapid expansion in the popularity of Python itself; the long-term result will be a new batch of supportable, reusable code.

Grayson begins with a three-line "hello world" variant that works out of the box. He moves quickly to a variety of GUI calculators to exhibit buttons and label widgets. Familiarity with Tk from Tcl/Tk or Perl/Tk is helpful but not essential. The convenient bonus of the Python implementation is its inclusion in the standard Python release, of which the current stable version is 1.5.

Nearly half of the book is dedicated to Tk widget implementations and constitutes a translation of Tk into Python. By itself, it is a good teaching tool for students of Python who already know Tk in one of its other manifestations. Appendices covering build/install issues Python megawidgets and a Tkinter reference manual comprise nearly 40 percent of the book, leaving a brief 15 percent for the introductory tutorial, application building, and performance tuning. A late chapter on threads suggests a broad range of client/server applications, but is too brief to be more than a tease. Throughout the text, code snippets are presented in coherent blocks with annotations sensibly appearing as clearly numbered end notes to those blocks.

Grayson presents cross-platform issues with maturity and candor. While Python for Windows and Macintosh environments is stable, he asserts, the Tkinter module does not have the same global look-and-feel control. Fonts and colors are dictated partially by the platform OS.

The subtle challenge for developers is to develop supportable code in the breakneck boss-pleasing, GUI-driven environment. Grayson's elegant introduction to Tkinter advances the subtext of supportability noticeably farther along. By documenting Tkinter, he will push a group of laggard hackers to learn object-oriented principles. And that may be his lasting contribution. --Peter Leopold

Review

"deeply thought, maturely written...does the double service of being a excellent object-oriented GUI book and communicating the standard..." -- Peter Leopold, Amazon.co.uk

...the very best resource for Tkinter programming there is—and if you use another toolkit, then it's still full of insight, useful advice and inspiration. -- comp.lang.python newsgroup

Until now, this level of documentation has not been available to Tkinter programmers.... -- CompBookReview.com

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Customer Reviews

19 Reviews

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
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3.6 out of 5 stars (19 customer reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Tkinter shortchanged, Oct 28 2003

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Peter Pearson (Aptos, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Ce commentaire est de: Python and Tkinter Programming (Paperback)

Tkinter gets a too-brief treatment in Grayson's rush to get on to the subject of Pmw, the Python megawidget library, which seems to be the real subject of the book. If you're not going to work in Pmw, most of this book is useless.

The basics of Tk are poorly presented, apparently on the assumption that the reader is already familiar with Tk. The first appendix is devoted to the mapping between Tk and Tkinter, a typical "nugget" being the revelation that the Tk construct "-label string" maps onto the Tkinter construct "label=string", which conveys no useful information in the absence of a complete Tk reference.

Appendix B, a Tkinter reference, has often left me frustrated. It begins with the understandable space-saving device of a list of "Options shared by most widgets," but then continues with "Options shared by many widgets" (why separate?) and "Common widget methods," whose connection with the rest of the appendix is obscure. Studying a widget's entry in Appendix B seldom produces a confident grasp of how to use that widget.

The book is mostly tutorial in form, suited for leisurely reading but frustrating as a reference.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Lots of info, poorly presented!, Sep 12 2003

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G. Roufosse (Edmonton) - See all my reviews
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Ce commentaire est de: Python and Tkinter Programming (Paperback)

I find that the author is out of touch with how to present material. He's already tackling a 'calculator' application by page 22. Quite a jump! He should have consulted with someone more experienced in material presentation for someone learning and/or trying to tie concepts together.By starting with basics in the early going, it would have made understanding a little easier in the more complex examples.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Not Enough about Tk, April 23 2002

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Sinclair (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Ce commentaire est de: Python and Tkinter Programming (Paperback)

I have programmed several commercial Macintosh and Windows applications and I have become fairly proficient with Python, so I figured that writing GUIs with Tkinter would be pretty straightforward and Grayson's book looked like a great place to start.

Not so. While it's fine to have lots of code samples, what would have been even better was much more nitty-gritty discussion of Tk itself. Tk is very clever and powerful, but it is not straightforward. This is even more true of Megawidgets, upon which Pmw is based, and which is widely used in Grayson's examples.

The appendices at the end are great if you know exactly what you are looking up but frustrating if you don't have a good overview of how Tk works. I recommend Effective Tcl/Tk Programming by Harrison and McLennan to fill in some of the many gaps in Grayson.

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Most recent customer reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Not for the timid
It is a great book for doing the most simple of
GUI tasks and for a reference once you have been using
Tkinter for an extended period of time. Lisez davantage

Published on Nov 21 2001

3.0 out of 5 stars Not for beginners
This book jumps in with examples full of concepts that are not explained (until perhaps later) and when I tried to make one run it didnt even "compile" (with Python... Lisez davantage

Published on Aug 6 2001 by Henri de Feraudy