Notes on "ZetCode's PyQt5 Tutorial" From a Windows Developer.

Once I decided to learn how to create a GUI application using the PyQt5 Python binding for the Qt framework, I looked online for some resources to get started. The reference guides for PyQt5 and Qt version 5 itself seems to be fairly robust, but I needed a little push to get over the initial learning curve to understand where to look for what I need.

The Python Foundation's wiki for PyQt tutorials has a fairly long list. But when I looked, only one explicitly states it is for PyQt5. So off I go to Zetcode's PyQt5 Tutorial. It was a very bare-bones tutorial that might be a bit too bare for a complete beginner trying to learn GUI programming. But for somebody who already knows the general concepts of a windowing graphics interface system, it is a quick primer to learn the vocabulary.

Since I've worked with various flavors of Windows frameworks (from raw Win32, to MFC, to WPF) I just needed a tutorial to help me connect concepts in my head to the terminology used in Qt. For example: in Qt, when something happens, a notification called a "signal" occurs. A signal can be connected to a "slot" which can then respond to whatever just happened. Once I learned this, I was able to translate the concepts into my head: a "signal" is an event that could be raised, and a "slot" is an event handler. Once I got this and a few other basic "Rosetta Stone" translations in my head I could switch to the reference documentation to find answers.

One important note: Even though it is labelled as a PyQt5 tutorial, Zetcode's tutorial is actually pretty much the PyQt4 tutorial updated with the changes to syntax needed for PyQt5. It doesn't actually cover anything that is new in Qt5. For me this is fine, because the "old way" covered in the tutorial is probably what I'll end up using when I go even further back in time for the ROS flavor of Qt.

But know there's no coverage of the Qt5 advancements in declarative interface construction, hardware-accelerated rendering, etc. Anybody who wants to learn the new toys of Qt 5 would have to look elsewhere.