before we start wading into the tkinter pondlet' begin with some perspective on python gui options in general because python has proven to be such good match for gui workthis domain has seen much activity over the years in factalthough tkinter is by most accounts still the most widely used gui toolkit in the python worldthere are variety of ways to program user interfaces in python today some are specific to windows or windows,some are cross-platform solutionsand all have followings and strong points of their own to be fair to all the alternativeshere is brief inventory of gui toolkits available to python programmers as write these wordstkinter an open source gui library and the continuing de facto standard for portable gui development in python python scripts that use tkinter to build guis run portably on windowsx windows (unix and linux)and macintosh os xand they display native look-and-feel on each of these platforms today tkinter makes it easy to build simple and portable guis quickly moreoverit can be easily augmented with python codeas well as with larger extension packages such as pmw ( third-party widget library)tix (another widget libraryand now standard part of python)pil (an image-processing extension)and ttk (tk themed widgetsalso now standard part of python as of version more on such extensions like these later in this introduction the underlying tk library used by tkinter is standard in the open source world at large and is also used by the perlrubyphpcommon lispand tcl scripting languagesgiving it user base that likely numbers in the millions the python binding to tk is enhanced by python' simple object model--tk widgets become customizable and embeddable objectsinstead of string commands tkinter takes the form of module package in python xwith nested modules that group some of its tools by functionality (it was formerly known as module tkinter in python xbut was renamed to follow naming conventionsand restructured to provide more hierarchical organizationtkinter is maturerobustwidely usedand well documented it includes roughly basic widget typesplus various dialogs and other tools moreoverthere is dedicated book on the subjectplus large library of published tkinter and tk documentation perhaps most importantlybecause it is based on library in this book"windowsrefers to the microsoft windows interface common on pcsand " windowsrefers to the interface most commonly found on unix and linux platforms these two interfaces are generally tied to the microsoft and unix (and unix-likeplatformsrespectively it' possible to run windows on top of microsoft operating system and windows emulators on unix and linuxbut it' not common as if to muddy the waters furthermac os supports python' tkinter on both windows and the native aqua gui system directlyin addition to platform-specific cocoa options (though it' usually not too misleading to lump os in with the "unix-likecrowd graphical user interfaces