Preface

In today's world of desktop applications, there is a great amount of incentive in being able to develop applications that can run in more than one environment. Currently, there are a handful of options available for cross platform frameworks to develop desktop applications in Python; wxPython is one such cross platform GUI toolkit for the Python programming language. It allows Python programmers to simply and easily create programs with a complete, highly functional graphical user interface. The wxPython code style has changed quite a bit over the years and has become much more Pythonic. The examples that you will find in this book are fully up to date and reflect this change in style. This cookbook provides you with the latest recipes to quickly create robust, reliable, and reusable wxPython applications. These recipes will guide you right from writing simple, basic wxPython scripts all the way through complex concepts and also feature various design approaches and techniques in wxPython.

This book starts off by covering a variety of topics, from the most basic requirements of a wxPython application to some of the more in-depth details of the inner workings of the framework, thus laying a foundation for any wxPython application. It then explains event handling, basic and advanced user interface controls, interface design and layout, creating dialogs, components, extending functionality, and so on. We will conclude by learning how to build and manage applications for distribution.

For each of the recipes, there is first an introductory and then more advanced examples along with plenty of example code that shows you how to develop and manage user-friendly applications. For more experienced developers, most recipes also include an additional discussion of the solution, allowing you to further customize and enhance the component.