The Mouse Vs. The Python

This week, I finished editing another book for Packt Publishing. The book’s name is Python Graphics Cookbook by Mike Ohlson de Fine (I think). You may wonder why I don’t know if de Fine is the author. Well, Packt thinks that its Technical Editors shouldn’t know that information. In fact, Packt is so cagey (and stupid) that they’ll give us forms to fill out asking us for the ISBN of the book we’re reviewing, but refuse to give us the ISBN.

Let it be known that Technical Reviewers for Packt Publishing are paid absolutely nothing. The only remuneration we get is a copy of the book we review, plus another book of our choice and our name/bio appears in the book we reviewed. That’s it. If Packt approaches you, let this be a warning to you.

Now, it’s not all bad. You get to read a book before almost everyone else AND you even get to help shape the book! That’s really cool! However, if you don’t read quickly, then this job is not for you. You usually only get 3 or 4 days to review a chapter. But enough of my whining, let’s get on with the Preview! (more…)

The other day, I received a complaint that my original notebook example in my Book control series was too complicated. I don’t really write just n00b-friendly articles and never claimed to, but this comment rankled, so I decided to write a super simple example for the wxPython newbies. I hope you like it! (more…)

Earlier this week, I was reading my copy of “Hello World” by Warren D. Sande and Carter Sande and in its chapter on graphical user interfaces, it mentioned a library called EasyGui. It’s the first and only Python GUI project I’ve seen that’s not event-driven. Instead, EasyGui is basically a set of dialogs that can be opened on demand. This package would be handy for command line programs that need to get information from the user using a dialog or for teaching new programmers about simple GUIs. Let’s take a quick look at what EasyGui can do. We’ll use some of the examples from the book. (more…)