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Wxpython in Action [Paperback]

Noel Rappin , Robin Dunn
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)

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Book Description

March 1, 2006
Because they are often large and complex, GUI programming tool kits can be hard to use. wxPython is a combination of the Python programming language and the wxWidgets toolkit, which allows programmers to create programs with a robust, highly functional graphical user interface, simply and easily. wxPython combines the power of an exceptionally complete user interface toolkit with an exceptionally flexible programming language. The result is a toolkit that is unique in the ease with which complex applications can be built and maintained.

"wxPython in Action" is a complete guide to the wxPython toolkit, containing a tutorial for getting started, a guide to best practices, and a reference to wxPython's extensive widget set. After an easy introduction to wxPython concepts and programming practices, the book takes an in-depth tour of when and how to use the bountiful collection of widgets offered by wxPython. All features are illustrated with useful code examples and reference tables are included for handy lookup of an object's properties, methods, and events. The book enables developers to learn wxPython quickly and remains a valuable resource for futurework.


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Wxpython in Action + wxPython 2.8 Application Development Cookbook + The Quick Python Book, Second Edition
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Noel Rappin is a Senior Consultant at Obtiva. A Rails developer for five years, Noel has spoken at RailsConf and Windy City Rails, and is the author of Professional Ruby on Rails from Wrox Press. A blog relating to this book can be found at http://www.railsrx.com.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 552 pages
  • Publisher: Manning Publications (March 1, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1932394621
  • ISBN-13: 978-1932394627
  • Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #129,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

If you are interested in WxPython at all, I would highly recommend it. Guido Paolano  |  7 reviewers made a similar statement
This book is hard to use as a reference but it is better than nothing. James Kepler  |  3 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
50 of 51 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for wxPython developers July 4, 2006
Format:Paperback
If, like me, you've been living under a rock (inasmuch as one can in the world of cross-platform GUI toolkits), you might not have heard much about wxPython. And if, like me, you were excited by the idea of quickly developing modern, robust GUI-driven applications that can run, without changes, on Windows, Mac OS X, and various UNIX-like systems, but turned off by the downright spartan and unforgiving online documentation, you can get happy again--with the publication of Noel Rappin and wxPython co-creator Robin Dunn's wxPython in Action, there is finally a cogent, coherent hybrid of tutorial and reference for wxPython that will get you out from under all that clunky Tkinter code and doing cool stuff.

Like other volumes in Manning's In Action series, wxPython presents a comfortable combination of introduction, overview, and example that encourages exploration and experimentation. The text is clear and concise, offering a no-nonsense explanation of the most relevant portions of the wxPython libraries and the best practices for their use, delivered at a measured pace that never manages to overwhelm, and uncannily launches into explanations of your questions just as they arise. Numerous reference tables provide a handy guide to the details (object properties, method signatures, events, etc.) that you'll be coming back to in your own future development. The expanded table of contents, listing each of the "how do I..." subsections of each chapter, is also a nice feature that will help make this a valuable reference. Code examples are functional, clean, and on-topic, just the right size to illustrate the concept at hand, and nearly always accompanied by illustrations of the resulting behavior.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic learning guide and reference manual September 6, 2006
Format:Paperback
I have dabbled in python some and played with 3 GUI toolkits for it: Tkinter, wxPython, and PyQT, but never had a good comprehensive manual to learn from. Scattered tutorials on the web of varying quality didn't help much.

Because of the 5-Star reviews for this book here on Amazon I purchased it and after having it 1 week I will add my 5-Star rating. This book is fantastic.

The writing is straightforward, the examples are clear, everything is explained concisely but comprehensively. I started at the first chapter and was very pleased that it started immediately with several simple GUI examples called bare.py and spare.py, for example.

Far too many programming books spend 1/3 of the book doing a basic tutorial of the language before you get to anything useful. Not this book. It states you should be somewhat familiar with Python and recommends another book if you need to learn it. So if you are beyond the basics and worried about getting another dumbed-down textbook, you can stop worrying; This book is ALL useful content.

I am immensely pleased with this book. Internet tutorials are useful for many things, so do not imagine I consider them useless for learning. But this book is superior and it is worth every penny.
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27 of 30 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Just barely adequate and not worth the money May 12, 2007
Format:Paperback
I've probably been spoiled by the excellently written tutorial for Java's Swing. wxPython in Action just barely covers the necessities. It has slightly more content than what's available online, but the structure of it makes it highly unsuitable as a reference.

The book boasts numerous tables that list most commonly used methods or classes for each topic, but the list is not exhaustive. Coupled with the rapidly changing API, the lists are nearly useless. There are also no screenshots with the various widgets all shown for comparison purposes or just to figure out which one you want.

Sections are constructed around questions, such as "How can I use file picker?", or "What color names are predefined?" Which is fine usually, except sometimes, the authors merely cover a very specific question instead of properly introducing a new widget and its functionality.

There are numerous other examples of where the book falls short. Sizers, similar to Swing's LayoutManagers, get a very brief treatment, focusing mostly on the, in my opinion, rather useless GridSizer. Compare this with the Swing Tutorial's in-depth treatment of each individual LayoutManager.

Want to know how to handle mouse events like the scroll wheel? Tough luck, because there's absolutely nothing in the book about it. Instead, the book gives you the basics of event handling and probably expects you to look up the details of scroll wheel handling in the API docs online (which do not have example code).

Overall, this book may be fine for getting you started on a basic application, say, a GUI front-end to a database. Anything more advanced and you had better be ready to get down and dirty with the online API docs.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars An introduction, not a reference November 6, 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
There is only one book on wxPython. If you have any serious interest, there are not a lot of choices. You have to get this book (Rappin and Dunn). The same is true of the wxWidgets by Smart, et. al.

This book contains lots of great samples of what you can do with wxPython. Great. If your problem looks like the sample, you can use the sample code.

If you want to go beyond the sample code, you are handicapped in two ways:

1) When flags, events, methods, etc. are discussed, the discussion introduces only the most often used. The tables which discuss the resources available to you start off incomplete.

2) The index is not strong. I count 544 pages covered by 1200 index entry lines. By contrast, the wxWidgets book is 662 pages, covered by 3240 index entry lines. When I need to look something up, I often find that neither book has an index entry for what I am looking for.

In contrast, Python Essential Reference by Beazley invariably has an entry for what I want to know. I hardly ever turn to the electronic documentation for Python itself as Beazley answers my Python questions in a single reference.

With wxPython and wxWidgets, I often need to turn to the electronic documentation because these two books need supplementation to serve as references.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Wxpython review
Excellent. It covered the material I expected it to and is good as an entry level WxPython course. I did not notice when I purchased that this book is 7 years old. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Richard Barr
2.0 out of 5 stars Useless for learning wxPython
I bought this book because I thought that reading it would be a good way to learn wxPython. Big mistake! Read more
Published on April 20, 2011 by Patrick
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice layout
After reading and following along with the examples of this book, I think that it's layout and style couldn't be improved upon very much. Read more
Published on December 21, 2010 by Bernhardt J. Outram
3.0 out of 5 stars Good book...for being only book available on Wxpython
The book is fairly good at describing Wxpython's features and capabilities. I think the book could be organized a little better or perhaps include a summary paragraph for each... Read more
Published on June 27, 2010 by Tamara Wauchope
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book
I am relatively new to python, and brand new to wxPython. I thought this book was an excellent introduction to general GUI programming, and very good at introducing WxPython. Read more
Published on April 29, 2010 by Guido Paolano
2.0 out of 5 stars Definitely not a reference book
I was highly disappointed in this book, but perhaps that was due to my high expectations. Documentation of wxPython is weak, and often I've been told "get the wxPython in Action... Read more
Published on February 20, 2010 by Another 'Dudes Fan
5.0 out of 5 stars The standard book for wxPython.
If you're reading this comment you're probably thinking; "which book should I buy?". But that's not the hard part. Read more
Published on January 18, 2010 by M. Lee
4.0 out of 5 stars Pretty much the only game in town
I'm a consultant and I wanted to use wxPython for a commercial application because a) my customer is comfortable with python, as I've delivered a previous product to them with it... Read more
Published on September 2, 2009 by someonesdad
4.0 out of 5 stars The only "one stop" source for wxPython information.
This is the best book you can get for wxPython programming. The alternative is to jump around the Internet on a scavenger hunt, picking up little bits here and there, all out of... Read more
Published on March 7, 2009 by Thomas M. Wetherbee
5.0 out of 5 stars gui programming on the go
Before I picked up this book I knew nothing about GUI programming, but a good bit about Python. This book let me jump right into writing useful GUI's. Read more
Published on August 29, 2008 by John Skinner
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Starting with Python at all
I'd suggest you not to replace Delphi with Python for building Windows GUI application.
I'm 9 years Delphi programmer who have been using python for anything but GUI for 3 years now. IMHO, if you are looking for way to build GUI application in Python with the same ease as doing so in Delphi,... Read more
May 4, 2006 by Sakesun Roykiattisak |  See all 3 posts
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