November 2010
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
18h 14m
English
Content preview from Real World Instrumentation with PythonBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Graphical User Interfaces
All modern general-purpose operating systems incorporate some type of graphical user interface (GUI) into their design. Only those operating systems intended for deeply embedded applications don’t come with some kind of GUI, since they don’t need one anyway (they usually don’t have any kind of user interface display, actually).
The GUI is a layer of functionality on top of the core operating system, and in some cases it may even be optional. In a Unix or Linux system, the GUI is started after the operating system loads as a discrete step in the boot sequence, and a Linux system will run just fine without the GUI. In other cases, such as with Windows, the GUI is tightly integrated into the OS, and while still technically a layer of functionality, it is not designed to be easily disabled.
In this section we’ll see how to use a GUI with Python. I won’t go into detailed code examples, mainly because anything beyond a simple “Hello World” GUI can get rather involved. What we will do is look at where the whole GUI concept originated, and why you might want to use one, rather than simple command-line or ANSI solutions like the ones we’re already seen in this chapter. We will wrap up with a look at some simple data display GUIs to give you a sense of what is involved in creating a GUI.
Some GUI Background and Concepts
Before undertaking a quick survey of a couple of GUI toolkits for Python, I’d like to take a look at the history of the GUI as we know it today. Many ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.