GUI Programming with Python QT Edition.pdf

GUI Programming with Python: QT Edition

The main topic of this book is application development using PyQt, a library
extension to the Python programming language — a library that is meant to form
the basis for GUI programming. PyQt is free software, but there is also a
commercial IDE available, BlackAdder, that is specially written to assist working
with PyQt. I will show you the ins and outs of PyQt by developing a complete and
complex application.

For whom is this book intended
This is the first book on Python and Qt. There have been quite a few books on C++
and Qt, but you would need to be fairly adept at mentally searching and replacing
C++ language constructs to be able to use those books for pleasure and profit if
your chosen language is Python. The same holds for the extensive html
documentation that comes with the C++ Qt library.
With the growing popularity of Python, PyQt and BlackAdder, people will start
using these tools who don't want to translate C++ to Python to figure out what they
are supposed to do.
This is the first group of people for whom I've written this book: beginning
software developers who have chosen Python because it allows them to become
productive quickly with a language and an environment that have been designed to
accommodate ‘subject specialists'. That is, people who need to get an application
done to help them with their work, but who are not developers by profession.
Then there are the experienced developers, people who have been coding in Visual
Basic, Delphi or Java, and who, like the first group, now need something a lot
more productive and portable. They will be able to grasp the concepts quickly, but
may find a lot of use in the advanced code examples and the in-depth discussion of
issues particular to PyQt.
Another group of possible readers consists of C++ developers who have turned to
Python as a rapid prototyping language. Prototyping with the same GUI library
they will use for their final C++ application will give them a definite advantage, as
most of the prototype code will remain useful.
Finally there are people who are more experienced in Python than I am, but who
want to get acquainted with one of the best-designed GUI toolkits available for the
language—there is a lot of interesting content to be found in this book for them,
too.
My aim in writing this book was to create a genuine vademecum for Python, PyQt
and GUI programming. If you keep referring to this book a year after you've
acquired it, if you can find the answer to most of your daily and quite a few of your
exceptional problems, and if you tend to keep this book in the vicinity of your
desk, then I will have succeeded.