book focuses on tkinter fundamentalsand tix and ttk are both too large to cover in useful fashion here pil the python imaging library (pilis an open source extension package that adds image-processing tools to python among other thingsit provides tools for image thumbnailstransformsand conversionsand it extends the basic tkinter image object to add support for displaying many image file types pilfor instanceallows tkinter guis to display jpegtiffand png images not supported by the base tkinter toolkit itself (without extensiontkinter supports gifs and handful of bitmap formatssee the end of for more details and exampleswe'll use pil in this book in number of image-related example scripts pil can be found at idle the idle integrated python development environment is both written in python with tkinter and shipped and installed with the python package (if you have recent python interpreteryou should have idle tooon windowsclick the start buttonselect the programs menuand click the python entry to find itidle provides syntax-coloring text editors for python codepoint-and-click debuggingand moreand is an example of tkinter' utility others many of the extensions that provide visualization tools for python are based on the tkinter library and its canvas widget see the pypi website and your favorite web search engine for more tkinter extension examples if you plan to do any commercial-grade gui development with tkinteryou'll probably want to explore extensions such as pmwpiltixand ttk after learning tkinter basics in this text they can save development time and add pizzazz to your guis see the python-related websites mentioned earlier for up-to-date details and links tkinter structure from more nuts-and-bolts perspectivetkinter is an integration system that implies somewhat unique program structure we'll see what this means in terms of code in momentbut here is brief introduction to some of the terms and concepts at the core of python gui programming implementation structure strictly speakingtkinter is simply the name of python' interface to tk-- gui library originally written for use with the tcl programming language and developed by tcl' creatorjohn ousterhout python' tkinter module talks to tkand the tk library in turn interfaces with the underlying window systemmicrosoft windowsx windows graphical user interfaces