8.12. The End of the TutorialIn this chapter, we learned the core concepts of Python/Tkinter programming and met a handful of simple widget objects along the waye.g., labels, buttons, frames, and the packer geometry manager. We've seen enough to construct simple interfaces, but we have really only scratched the surface of the Tkinter widget set. In the next two chapters, we will apply what we've learned here to study the rest of the Tkinter library, and we'll learn how to use it to generate the kinds of interfaces you expect to see in realistic GUI programs. As a preview and roadmap, Table 8-1 lists the kinds of widgets we'll meet there in roughly their order of appearance. Note that this table lists only widget classes; along the way, we will also meet a few additional widget-related topics that don't appear in this table.
We've already met the Label, Button, and Frame in this chapter's tutorial. To make the remaining topics easier to absorb, they are split over the next two chapters: Chapter 9 covers the first widgets in this table up to but not including Menu, and Chapter 10 presents widgets that are lower in this table. Besides the widget classes in this table, there are additional classes and tools in the Tkinter library, many of which we'll explore in the following two chapters as well:
Most Tkinter widgets are familiar user interface devices. Some are remarkably rich in functionality. For instance, the Text class implements a sophisticated multiline text widget that supports fonts, colors, and special effects and is powerful enough to implement a web browser's page display, and the Canvas class provides extensive drawing tools powerful enough for visualization and other image processing applications. Beyond this, Tkinter extensions such as the Pmw and Tix packages described at the start of this chapter add even richer widgets to a GUI programmer's toolbox. |