This chapter outlines GUI options available to Python developers, and then presents a tutorial that illustrates core Tkinter coding concepts in the context of simple user interfaces.

This chapter begins a two-part tour of the Tkinter library—its widget set and related tools. This first tour chapter covers simpler library tools and widgets: pop-up windows, various types of buttons, images, and so on. We also meet the Python Imaging Library (PIL) image processing extension here.

This chapter continues the library tour begun in the prior chapter. It presents the rest of the Tkinter widget library, including menus, text, canvases, scroll bars, grids, and time-based events and animation. This section leads us toward some of the larger examples to follow.

This chapter takes a look at GUI programming techniques: we’ll learn how to build menus automatically from object templates, spawn GUIs as separate programs, run long-running tasks in parallel with threads and queues, and more.

This chapter pulls the earlier chapters’ ideas together to implement a collection of user interfaces. It presents a collection of larger GUIs—clocks, text editors, drawing programs, image viewers, and so on—which also demonstrate general Python programming-in-the-large concepts along the way.