Is it necessary to call Tk() when writing a GUI app with Tkinter?

[Mark Roseman]

 Rick Johnson <rantingrickjohnson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Book authors and Doc authors are not always the most well informed; as
> we have witnessed by this very thread! Obviously these tutorials are more 
> like: "What NOT to do when coding Tkinter GUIs!" No wonder everyone hates Tkinter.  :-)

Indeed. One of the things that motivated me to write the tutorial at 
http://www.tkdocs.com is the rather poor state (in terms of being out of 
date, incorrect, or demonstrating poor practices) of most Tkinter 
documentation.

Call it self-serving, but I think the Tkinter world would be a happier 
place if everyone just pointed to TkDocs. ;-)

To your point about explicit root, etc. I'll make the general 
observation that lots of different things work in a given situation, 
which is just fine for quick little hacky things. If people are doing 
anything more than a throwaway however, they'd be better served by 
spending a bit of time learning the conceptual underpinnings (e.g. 
http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/concepts.html) after which the "right" 
thing to do will be more obvious.

Mark