Review: Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook: Building responsive and powerful cross-platform applications with PyQt
By EricMesa
- 2 minutes read - 316 words
Qt5 Python GUI Programming Cookbook: Building responsive and powerful cross-platform applications with PyQt by B.M. Harwani
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
On the plus side, this book gave me the knowledge I needed to finally complete a GUI for my Extra Life Donation tracker program ( https://github.com/djotaku/ELDonation…). I’d tried many different GUI toolkits and none of them was getting me what I wanted. I wanted to use QT since I love using KDE, but it was just too complicated and free posts on various blogs didn’t quite take me far enough. So for that I’m grateful to this book. There are also future improvements I’ll be able to make to my code thanks to this book.
However, I did have to knock off two stars for two related reasons involving errors. The first one is annoying if you don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s not the end of the world - there are times where he tells you the text to write on a button or a label and it doesn’t match the screenshot in the book. Like the text says to have the button say “Go” and the screenshot says “Click Me”. It’s not a big deal as long as you’re consistent in the code. What is worse is that there are MANY indentation errors here. And Python is a language where indentation matters! It, not curly braces, is what determines when code blocks start and end. So the reader constantly has to be asking themselves if this indentation makes sense and then adapting their code if it gets a runtime error.
I usually don’t come across errors like these in O’Reilly or Starch Press programming books, but on reddit the Pakt books have a bad reputation. Perhaps this is why. So, it’s very useful (especially being the cookbook style book), but reader beware of following the examples blindly.