Programs that have graphical user interfaces are much more powerful than programs that provide services via character-only interfaces, because graphical user interfaces engage the human visual problem-solving faculty. Accordingly, you need to learn how to build graphical user interfaces.

In this chapter, you learn how to create windows; in the next chapter, you learn how to draw lines of the sort needed to produce a meterlike drawing, which eventually becomes part of a movie-rating display. When you have completed this chapter and the next two, you will know the essentials of drawing. That knowledge will enable you to understand how to produce displays such as the following:

At first, you will be limited to drawing with wired-in data. You learn how to incorporate data from a movie-describing file in Chapter 45.