newbie question: should I learn TKinter or skip it and learn more advanced toolkit?

Fuzzyman michael at foord.net
Wed May 12 04:58:14 EDT 2004


porky_pig_jr at my-deja.com (Porky Pig Jr) wrote in message news:<56cfb0e3.0405111528.b203b78 at posting.google.com>...
> I'm in a process of digging into Python, and one of the problems I'm
> having is whether I should spend any time at all learning TKinter or
> skip it and start with more advanced staff like wx or QT.
> 
> I have no experience with GUI whatsoever, so anything will be a
> learning experience for me. The reason I've decided to post this
> question is that I see some contradictory information in different
> resources.
> 
> In 'Programming Python', learning TKinter is recommended -- before you
> move to more advanced toolkits. The rationale is (i) it is built-in
> and since it is also shared by TCL and Perl, it is well-maintained and
> always in sync with the latest version of Python, (ii) it is fairly
> simple to learn, small learning curve, easier to grasp some concepts
> before moving to more comprehensive production quality toolkit such as
> QT.
> 
> In some other resources TKinter is critisized as not well integrated
> at Python at all, so recommendation is 'not to waste your time and
> start learning GUI with either wx or QT'.
> 
> My intent is *not* to become professional GUI developer, but simply to
> get a handle on it, so if I write some utilities, I can provide some
> nice GUI if required. Yet of course, since I'm learning something new,
> it would be nice to learn it 'right from the start'.
> 
> So: should I spend some time or TKinter or simply skip it and start
> learning GUI with something like wx or QT?
> 
> (my background: solid C, enough C++ to understand the OOP concepts,
> Perl, too much of it to my liking, BTW)
> 
> TIA.


I was faced with the same dilemna - and was about to dive nto wx when
my copy of 'Programming Python' arrived through the post. The wx
tutorials I had found were a bit obscure - it's possible there are
good ones out there... I just failed to find them !!

I followed the tutorial on Tkinter in Programming Python - once you've
got over the initial learning curve it's not bad and pretty flexible.

I've not reached the point yet where Tkinter isn't powerful enough for
what I need to do - but then I've only written small apps... nothing
huge.

*I'd* certainly reccommend starting with Tkinter - when you've got the
basics it's very easy to hack together a simple GUI...

You can have a look at Nanagram - a python anagram generator that has
a Tkinter front end... The whole program is about 20k including
comments. (Added to which it's great fun to use - use the link below).

Regards,


Fuzzy

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html



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