This is about it.
If you have been searching for wxPython books, you may notice that this is about it. And if you buy it you may wish there were others to choose from. I think the book is solid in foundation material but it is not very well organized. I like to be able to skim through a programming book, get ideas of functionality that are useful to my work, and then proceed with my work, turning back to the book for occasional reference, clarification, or a little more insight into advanced techniques, which typically helps with refactoring.
This book almost forces you to go through its code base, which is rather sparse and tied into much narrative (perhaps too much for a programming book). Maybe some people have a different learning approach, but I would prefer to get my hands dirty immediately and shoot off on a thousand experiments of "what if I changed this, tweaked that, used it in this way or that way." That is how I learn to code in a new environment; then back to some narrative and examples to perhaps explain why it works that way if not obvious.
That is how I find much of wxPython in general, not obvious. On the other hand, it seems about the best current solution for doing GUI with python. PyQt4 is amuck with the whole licensing issue and basically treats python users like second-class add-ons. No thanks. And quite frankly most of the other GUI development environment I have tinkered with just seem to fail in comparison.
So, if you are interested in wxPyhton, and don't find the online documentation that complete, then this it. There is a PDF version that I ended up getting from the publisher, not sure if Amazon offers it, but given that I will likely be tied to the book and the IDE for a while to get acquainted, I would consider this route if you find yourself in a similar learning mode/environment.
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. Typical programming text books build on concepts sequentially, which is great for classrooms but not for learning on the fly. This book just jumps right into applications and teaches through examples. I was so impressed by this method that I plan on buying more books from the in action series whenever I need to learn another programming language. This book has been my #2 resource right behind Google, which is saying a lot.
Not many choices for WxPython books
This book is hard to use as a reference but it is better than nothing.
Great for getting you started
I bought this book when I needed to write a wxpython app at work. I'd done a lot of programming in python before, but had very little experience writing gui apps and non using wx. This book got me up and running very quickly and I was using wxpython productivly almost imidiatly. This book gives a solid introduction to the basics on wxpython and how to test and develop wxpython apps.
However the book doesn't cover a lot of more advanced or complex topics. If you need to to anything that isn't the most common and obvious approach you'll be on your own. I quite quickly found myself running into problems that wheren't covered in this book.
So on the whole this is a great book for quickly getting you up and running, and will have you writing simple wxpython apps in no time. However for anything more complicated you need to consult other sources.
An Advanced WxPython in Action book would be most welcome.
wxPython In Action
Simply awesome. Awesome cubed:
(i) wxWidgets is a wonderful thing - a cross-platform windowing
toolkit that uses native widgets to give extremely pretty
cross-platform GUI applications.
(ii) wxPython is a fabulous implementation of wxWidgets in Python,
taking advantage of various Python fabulousities to make using
wxWidgets much easier than in C++. (If you do any programming
but you've never heard of Python run, don't walk, to
[..].)
(iii) The book is an excellent introduction to wxPython. I
had a little emergency, caused by the fact that my PC had
died and my Delphi programs didn't seem to work on the MAC
I was migrating to. Starting with no knowledge of wxPython
(but with some familiarity with Python) in one three-day
weekend I was able to write a rudimentary spreadsheet application -
at the end of those three days it already worked better than
the Delphi application it was replacing (just because writing
Python is so easy I added a few features that I'd never got
around to adding to the Delphi version).
If you've been looking for something that does this sort of
thing then wxPython is what you want, and you want this book
to go with it.
(If you're a Python person who's been using tkinter: wxWidgets
is not much harder, it includes _much_ more builtin functionality,
and it gives _much_ nicer results, since it uses native widgets.)
David C. Ullrich
(22 reviews)
