One feature I would like to see added to ebooks is the ability to link a word or phrase in the text to definitions or explanations found in other parts of the text.
As great as this new book is for explaining the aspects of developing wxPython applications, I did have a few criticisms about the book.
In Part 1, "Introduction to wxPython," some chapters seem to provide too much information, especially for users who have had no experience with GUI frameworks. While Chapter 1 lives up to the book's "in Action" presentation style, some parts of Chapter 2 do not. In the first four sections of Chapter 2, the book gets bogged down in an extremely detailed discussion about opening application objects, redirecting output, and shutting down applications. As a result, the text here seems rather dense, and makes the going rather slow. The majority of the material presented in the first half of Chapter 2 could have been included in a later, advanced section of the book, or in an Appendix. Fortunately, the second half of Chapter 2 gets back to the "in Action" style.
In Chapter 3, "Working in an Event-Driven Environment," more or less the same writing problem happens again. The reader get exposed to lots and lots of detail about event-driven programming issues before seeing any code. The presentation once again made me feel as if I was reading a dense reference manual. In this case, I had to read through almost nine pages of text before I saw a coded implementation of event binding. This was way more detail than I needed to understand basic event binding. It was also more detail than I was going to need for the sketch pad example in Chapter 6. Unfortunately, this dense and overly detailed treatment of the event-driven environment went on for the rest of Chapter 3.
In Chapter 4, "Making wxPython Easier to Handle with PyCrust," the prose is again dense and long on detail. Given the relatively simple examples in this book, I didn't feel a chapter on using PyCrust, a program analysis tool, was needed. Even more surprising, this tool doesn't seem to be mentioned again in the rest of book. While I agree PyCrust is useful, I feel its discussion should have been placed in an Appendix. A similar problem appears in Chapter 5, "Creating Your Blueprint." Here the authors discuss the Model/View architecture, testing, and re-factoring of GUI based programs. Most of this material seems too advanced for this part of the book, and would be better suited to an Appendix.
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