Customer Reviews

Learning Perl/Tk

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

There's all sorts of great ideas presented in this book, but there's no coherent structure. I would have prefered a book that went through building a few small useful applications, rather than being introduced to widget after widget after widget. In order to get help writing a complete application, it's necessary to skip through multiple sections of the book.

Also, the idea that all of the properties for a widget have to be provided in the body of a chapter is ridiculous. Make 'em look in the Appendix! That what it's for!

This book is extremely frustrating and I do recommend the "panther" book or the Perl Cookbook.

-Doc

I started learning perl/tk from the panther book (O`Reilly's Advanced Perl Programming). While the panther gave me a fantastic start to perl/tk, I eagerly awaited the release of learning perl/tk. When I finally got it, what a disappointment!! It was way too basic and the shallow, repetative examples did not help at all. Okay, if I need to see what a grooved vs sunken label looks like, I go to the learning perl/tk book (but only cuz I already wasted my money buying it). But time and again, if I have a real perl/tk problem, I go back to the panther and extrapolate the answer from the clearly presented realworld perl/tk examples.

O'Reilly defended itself on the perl/tk newgroup saying they were aiming for middle-of-the-road as opposed to too advanced, in my opinion they definitely missed middle-of-the-road and wrote learning perl/tk for the user with no imagination and no desire to create useful, realworld GUI's

I have a copy of the March 1999 printing (not quite a second edition). The complaints that I read about in the first printing seem to have been corrected.

I produced my first practice Perl/Tk window in less than 1/2 hour from the time I opened "Learning Perl/Tk".

Like most software books, better examples of programming style would help to produce more standardized code. Also while features are discussed, the relative trades offs of differnt approaches are not really explored (e.g. when to use pack, grid or place; when to use a check box verses an option; when a window is busy enough and a new window should be created). In spite of having never done any Tcl, I was able to make my first test screen within 1/2 hour of opening the took.

Though I consider the Camel book (Programming Perl) and the Panther book (Advanced Perl Programming) necessary reference books, I probably actually spend more time wandering through "Learning Perl.Tk" and "Teach yourself PERL 5 in 21 days".

I used this book to learn the basics of Tk with Perl under Windows, and found it a fine, concise and clear reference. It got me quickly to the point of being able to develop useful graphical applications and gave what I felt to be a good grounding in important concepts and points. It does not address absolutely everything you will eventually need to know, but at least you will have a good grounding and probably find the subsequent learning curve a lot shallower as a result. Important coverage of the geometry managers (pack, place and grid) is well presented and good examples are given. Numerous other possibly trivial but extremely helpful things are here too: how to set the size and initial screen location of Tk-generated window (use the 'geometry' method), a good discussion of the colour-management issues of the various widgets - including how to find the file of colour definitions under various operating systems, and a clear explanation of the various ways to call subroutines (and pass parameters to them) using '-command'.

Ms. Walsh's style is light and conversational, not at all 'difficult' and without the usual 'clever geek' frills (for example, I personally hate the use of 'foo' and 'bar' as variable and function names everywhere in computing books - it smacks of self-congratulatory cleverness, and more than a tad 'Oh, don't you get it?'). Fortunately that is absent here.

Highly recommended if you are new to Tk under Perl, as it contains essential information and is well written and presented. Definitely worth the money.

I do not share the many preceeding disappointed reviews on this book. This book gave me all I needed to work with Perl/Tk. I developped various GUI's (PC, Unix) with MSVC, MSVB, Smalltalk and even with a C Version on the Atari ST1040 years ago (a real pain). Perl/Tk's approach is the most simple approach I found so far with best ready-to-use functionality when you want to implement a functional GUI. The price to pay is that you need to envision the GUI first, rather than "drawing" it. The envision-part now is easier for me after reading this book. After reading this book I knew enough to implement various simple and complex GUIs. The one I'm proud of is a variable GUI, which changes it's look according to arguments passed by the commandline. (We will use this one to improve some business processes.) While doing so the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference is a 'friend' to the GUI-developper, as some specific parts can be found faster there than in this book. I admit, some Perl-specific syntactical constructs from Perl/Tk's syntax I had to become used to. I better understood these after reading Srinivasan's "Advanced Perl Programming". GUI-developpment is hardly ever an easy-going task, if you want to do more than an on-the-fly job. On the average, I spent 90-95% of time for the graphical input and output before the interesting 5-10% of the programs real task can become alive. With Perl/Tk I could reduce the GUI-part to about 75-90%, thanks to this book. A good program and a good GUI is the result of prior ambitious and clever problem analysis. Once you know what you want to implement you'll find all you need to know HOW to implement all the GUI-stuff right here in this book. If this book had a quick reference just like the pocket guide it would be perfect for me. BTW: this book is one of the few I can read in my noisy office.

I bought this book with experience with GUI programming experience in both Windows and Linux, but had never really tried TCL/Tk. Perl being my latest obsession, I decided it was time to write some graphical front-ends for my scripts. As I scoped out the field, I reallized that the pickings were slim: only 3 books soley on the TK Perl module. Figuring I wasn't ready for the "Mastering Perl/TK", I bought the "Learning Perl/Tk" (with the Pocket Reference as well). Having finished and applied the knowledge I acquired from the book, I must say that the book leaves a rather strange "after-taste". While it is certainly sufficient for actually learning Perl/Tk, it really moves rather quickly and doesn't cover much in the full scheme of things. Will you be able to write pretty GUIs for your Perl scripts? Why of course, but don't expect to learn anything too complex. I found that this book alone is really not good for learning how to create complex GUIs that are on par with standard GUI APIs found on most desktop computers, and thus some online research is neccessary.

On a more positive note, I really like the way the book is organized. Much better than "Programming Perl", "Learning Perl" or "Mastering Regular Expressions". Just about every other page has a code demonstration and screen shot of how one of the widgets/concepts is implemented. Very nice, when compared to standard O'reilly work.

In a nutshell (no pun intended), "Learning Perl/Tk" is a good reference book that introduces Perl programmers to the Tk module, but really falls short of perfection by not demonstrating the practical integrating of Tk within a Perl script. If you have experience with TCL/Tk, buy "Mastering Perl/Tk" instead, but if you have no Tk/GUI experience, pick this one up and purchase "Mastering Perl/TK" after you have the basic/intermediate concepts down.

The discussion of most widgets starts with what looks like a cut-n-paste block of text describing (again and again) the options. How many times does one need to be told that -foreground sets the color of the text? This builds bulk (pages) but doesn't add value.

The treatment of methods is scatter-shot at best with very little information provided.

No significant example __anywhere__ (eg, a simple addressbook app).

This is a book for Tk beginners. It does not fully explore the intricacies of widgets nor the dynamic interactions between widgets and the user. The author frequently mentions (briefly) what can or will happen but neglects to include Perl/Tk code to typify a working solution. Rather than tackle substantive problems herself, annoyingly she puts that burden on the reader under the guise of "Fun Things to Try" at the end of some chapters! The book would benefit from the inclusion of working solutions to these "fun" problems. As it stands, the book lacks substantive Perl/Tk code, leading me to wonder: has she written an end-user Perl/Tk application or is she just regurgitating the documentation? ....

This book did exactly what I wanted it to do. It's a very readable introduction with a clear, logical development of concepts, and it is also so thorough in its spelling out of all the options that it is also a good reference. I.e. it can be read sequentially or in random access mode. Missing are detailed discussions of Dialog and Message pop-up windows. Some people might find the constant spelling out of details a negative. But this is better than having to guess or search for info all the time. Examples are all minimal. I like this, because I hate wading through other people's over-lengthy code examples.

This book will NOT help you produce anything useful with Perl/Tk. It is too shallow and too dry. A big disappointment. The fact that it has reached the sales rank it has (around 5000 as of this writing) is a sign of the thirst for a good Perl/Tk reference in the market. Too bad O'reilly wasted this chance. Hopefully they will do a better job next time. But you be careful and don't waste _your_ money with this book.