ABOUT THIS BOOK

xxvii

Chapter 14, Coordinating the grid control

If you want something that looks like a spreadsheet, the wxPython grid control is a full-featured widget that will meet your needs. It allows full control over the display and behavior of the grid, and allows for complete customization.

Chapter 15, Climbing the tree control

The wxPython tree control allows for compact display of hierarchical data, including, but not limited to a directory tree or class hierarchy. Yo u can also allow the user to edit entries on the fly.

Chapter 16, Incorporating HTML into your application

Within wxPython, you can use HTML to simplify the display and printing of styled text. The HTML engine inside wxPython can also be customized to fit your special needs.

Chapter 17, The wxPython printing framework

Printing is managed from a wxPython application through several dedicated print, print data, and print preview objects. In this chapter, we explore how all of them work together.

Chapter 18, Using other wxPython functionality

In this chapter, we cover some important features that are not quite long enough to justify a chapter on their own, including cut and paste, drag and drop, and multithreading.

How to use this book

How you use this book will depend on your wxPython knowledge. We designed this book to be useful for both experts and novices, but we expect that different parts of the book will have more or less resonance for users at different levels.

If you are a wxPython beginner, you definitely want to start in part 1. Chapters 1–3 will give you a solid grounding in wxPython concepts, and chapter 6 will give you a nice overview of the steps in building a reasonably sized program. Chapter 5 will introduce you to some methods for making your code easy to manage, and chapter 4 will have some tools to help you debug and write wxPy-thon applications. As you start writing your own wxPython programs, you’ll also start using the API discussions in part 2—we tried to organize them by functionality to make it easy to find useful topics.

If you are already familiar with wxPython, you’ll probably be spending most of your time in parts 2 and 3. However, we recommend you take a spin through part 1 as well. If you aren’t familiar with PyCrust, then chapter 4 will be new to you, and we think you might get something useful out of chapter 5 as well. You’ll find discussion of more complex widgets in part 3, and you’ll also see that the