Customer Reviews

Mastering Perl/Tk

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Fortunately, this book didn't disappoint me, it lived up to all the hype I'd heard, and had begun to anticipate, two months before it was available.

The index and table of contents are excellent (a must for any good reference book). The index seems very thorough and takes up about 30 pages. The table of contents, and thus the book, is laid out in a manner that makes it easy to find topics/subtopics of interest.

There is a 60-page appendix table "Options and Default Values for Each Widget" which I've already placed a stickem on for quick reference. The appendix would have been even more invaluable if each widget (and possibly some lesser used/known attributes) had a page number reference so one doesn't have to find an entry there, and then have to look it up a second time in the index to find more details.

There is also another appendix that contains complete program listings for fun/useful programs like progress bars, MP3 player, RPN calculator, etc. They are useful as extensive examples of Perl/Tk code, if nothing else. The only downside is that there are no electronic copies (CD or web links) to these programs and some are rather lengthy.

Although I consider myself a beginner with Perl/Tk, I believe that it will also serve as an invaluable reference to advanced users of Perl/Tk and have heard from at least one or two experienced users via chat that it is far superior to Nancy Walsh's first book Learning Perl/Tk. I browsed the first book and opted not to purchase it, but this book is well worth the price.

Note to the reviewer from Peoria. Did you mean to review the pocket reference instead of the full book? Otherwise, your last comment about "moving up" to Mastering Perl/Tk doesn't make any sense in relation to the rest of your review.

This book has so far given me all the information I've
needed to write usable GUIs. However, I share the concern
expressed by other reviewers that the the titles 'Learning
Perl/Tk' and 'Mastering Perl/Tk' can be misleading. While
it's reasonable to assume that the 'Learning' volume is
introductory/tutorial while the 'Mastering' volume is for
advanced techniques, this is not the case. The 'History of
this Book' section of the preface describes it as an
expansion of 'Learning Perl/Tk', not a sequel or supplement.
There is no need to buy both books.

I picked this book up and learned enough from it to write (in a few weeks) a nice little GUI-based data display program that's being used to monitor train schedule adherence at the US's second-largest subway system. So obviously the book is useful.

But it's also a bit frustrating. The index is almost completely useless; 90% of the time I do not find anything remotely related to the word on the page that it's supposed to be on. Sometimes if I go back and forth a dozen pages I think I find the actual page. There are a fair number of typos that I discovered (most of which are, admittedly, corrected on O'Reilly's web site.) There's this bizarre example of having two MainWindows in the same application, something that mislead *me* into trying the same thing before I discovered how awfully awkward it was.

So while the book was excellent for getting me "jump-started" into the world of Perl/Tk, I do not use it much as a reference anymore. Now that I know the ropes, the man pages get me to the information much more quickly than this book.

Fortunately, this book didn't disappoint me, it lived up to all the hype I'd heard, and had begun to anticipate, two months before it was available.

The index and table of contents are excellent (a must for any good reference book). The index seems very thorough and takes up about 30 pages. The table of contents, and thus the book, is laid out in a manner that makes it easy to find topics/subtopics of interest.

There is a 60-page appendix table "Options and Default Values for Each Widget" which I've already placed a stickem on for quick reference. The appendix would have been even more invaluable if each widget (and possibly some lesser used/known attributes) had a page number reference so one doesn't have to find an entry there, and then have to look it up a second time in the index to find more details.

There is also another appendix that contains complete program listings for fun/useful programs like progress bars, MP3 player, RPN calculator, etc. They are useful as extensive examples of Perl/Tk code, if nothing else. The only downside is that there are no electronic copies (CD or web links) to these programs and some are rather lengthy.

Although I consider myself a beginner with Perl/Tk, I believe that it will also serve as an invaluable reference to advanced users of Perl/Tk and have heard from at least one or two experienced users via chat that it is far superior to Nancy Walsh's first book Learning Perl/Tk. I browsed the first book and opted not to purchase it, but this book is well worth the price.

Note to the reviewer from Medford, OR: Did you mean to review the pocket reference instead of the full book? Otherwise, your last comment about "moving up" to Mastering Perl/Tk doesn't make any sense in relation to the rest of your review.

This book is heavily redundant to Learning Perl/Tk. I would say about 1/3 of the book is new content, of which the majority is poorly organized.

Textual content is written in a teaching context.

In the examples there are a lot of things being done implicitly, and comments are lacking. This defeats much of the teaching functionality of the textual content that references to the examples.

The custom widget section, is some of the most disorganized technical writing I've seen. Things that should be footnotes are left as content. In my copy of chapter 14, if you were to couple the X'd out superfluous language with the pencil notes in the margin used to decipher the remaining text (after referencing _Programming Perl_, the POD and usenet) you would nearly equal the content of the author.

They appear to have been stretching for length like a freshman year term paper, Noted by the 75 pages of options tables in the rear that are redundant to the core widget option tables in the front, or otherwise straight out of the POD.

This book leaves a lot of room for a competing title. There is however none at this time to my knowledge. Therefore buy it anyway, if you plan on working heavily in Perl/Tk.

To use the word "Mastering" in the title is begging criticism. If you are looking for a definative work, this isn't it. But it is available, and will get you through the first half of your head scratching while developing with Perk/Tk.

This is a good and very systematic introduction to Perl / Tk. If you are looking to get up to speed rapidly and understand in depth later is is a little harder to find the information you need. It would have been nice if the book had a "quick start" chapter.

I had a Perl/Tk application started and my customer was impressed but when I received this book, I was able to perform a number of GUI items which were beyond the capacity of the Learning Perl/Tk which I had been previously using or the Internet queries I had used. The applications were easy to find using the index and easy to implement. The depth of this book was sufficient to take my application to a much more sophisticated level, closer to what I could have done using JAVA. I had been unable to find the answers found here on either the Internet or the previous Perl Books I had used.

The only reason you would want to buy this book is if you want to modify an existing perl/tk program. Even then, I do not recommend buying it.

Perl/tk is discontinued!!!!!! ActivePerl now uses the package tkx to bridge tk and perl. Although similar to perl/tk, it has many new updates not included in this book. Plus, the syntax is new.

Here is a good explanation as why tkx is now used:

"Because Perl/Tk extricated Tcl from Tk, it took considerable effort to track newer Tk releases, and so has waned in modern years. The recommended Tk binding for Perl now is the "Tkx" module, a much smaller layer that provides a direct bridge to the Tcl API that Tk exposes." -tkdocs dot com

This book provides a lot of information about Perl/Tk, but in a somewhat scattered fashion, making true mastery of the subject an intensive process. It is an excellent learning tool, but the reader should be aware that there is much to learn beyond what is presented here.

I'm a big fan of the O'Reilly Perl books. Most of them are very well written, and can really increase your knowledge about a topic. But this book is an exception. Simply put, it's horrible. Don't buy this book. It's poorly written, has a bad style, and provides nothing that you couldn't easily get from online documentation.