Customer Reviews

Tcl/Tk, Second Edition: A Developer's Guide (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Software Engineering and Programming)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

[I'm stingy in my ratings. I could easily give this book 5 stars, but I try to use the entire rating scale.]

This book is the best available complement to the free HTML documentation (which is available online, or on CD in many books, including this one). I like the latest version of the Welch book, with its vastly improved index, but I find the explanations to be a bit sparse.

For example, I am an experienced programmer in several languages, but I still had a lot of questions about local scoping vis-a-vis namespaces after reading Welch and the docs. Flynt made this topic transparent, with diagrams and examples. I also liked his example of building a tree data structure, which demonstrated to me better than anything that Tcl is simply the wrong language for building trees.

That brings me to what I dislike about this book. The code examples are sometimes too long. In my opinion, long code should be only on the CD, to save paper space. And as the book is shorter than Welch's latest, I think the space should not have been wasted.

About 1/3 of the book is devoted to Tk, similar to Welch. I have no interest in Tk anymore, so that is all a waste for me. (If you ARE interested in Tk, Effective Tcl/Tk programming is a great source.)

There is a fair amount of info on the C library, but I think that Ousterhout's old book is still the best place for that. However, Flynt provides great advice on practical ways of interfacing with C/C++ (SWIG, Starkits, Starpacks).

He also details the pro and cons of various Tcl tools, some free. This sort of information goes out of date quickly. For example, the author already mentioned privately to a friend that "nagelfar" is now his own favorite syntax checker. But at the moment, most of his info is current.

In short, this is the best book for Tcl developers. But please consider Lua as an alternative interfacing language.

The book is in textbook format, with problems to be worked at the end of each chapter. The problems are of different levels of difficulty. No answers in the back.

The book itself is NOT concise, imho, and there seems to be many references to "see the CD" for complete information. Clearly, it is intended that you work with the CD to first accomplish the tutorials, and then use the book to polish what you've learned via the CD. The cute little "scroll" way of navigating about the CD works well in Windows, but doesn't work on my linux machine. The CD is also the only place where there is "A printable Reference"; at least, that's what the book says. I'm still looking for it.

You clearly get all the stuff you need to become a Tcl/Tk master, but with so much material, the reader is left to blunder through it all the best he can. To meet the goal of learning Tcl/Tk quickly as stated in the introduction, a "road map", "plan of attack", or an order of things to read on the disk should have been included.

This book is fairly informal, with examples dominating the reference parts. I think I'll be using Brent Welch's book more as a reference though. There is good coverage of third party libraries and tools.

I was looking for a book to learn and start programming in TCL. The book has allowed me to do it. I had some problems with the way the informationw was presented. The book does not focus on TCL and the exact explinations for each commandis not present clearly.

The book does cover a lot of detail and there is a nice collection of stuff on the CD included so it is a good value for its cost.

When I needed to write some TCL for an EDA test bench and for FPGA syntheses I ran into the issue that TCL has a significant structure than other languages such as non-object oriented Perl. Because of this I didn't know for what to search. After reading this book I was able to know the questions I needed to ask.

Clif's book is good for learning not only the basics of Tcl/Tk (which this book does very well), but also when to use each of the skills you use. Each lesson is digestible and fluid and builds upon the last, always in a useful, goal-oriented way. Through this, his diction and use of metaphors, you can start to see and make your own his deep understanding of the language and its many various applications.

Tcl is a multi-faceted language. You can use Tcal a s a command scripting language, as a powerful multi platform interpreted language, as a rapid prototyping platform, or as a library of interpreter calls within another project. Tcl's simple syntax makes single use scripts quick and easy to write. Tcl's modulations and encapsulation features help you develop large projects. Tcl's extensibility makes it easy to use Tcl as the base language across a broad range of projects, from machine control to database applications to electronic design applications, network test devices etc.

I found this book very well structured and informative with a level of detailed attuned for both as a reference for an experiences programmer to a learning guide for a novice.

This book covers the Tcl language and the Tk toolkit in exhaustive detail. It works very well as an introduction to Tcl/Tk and as a reference guide for developers more experienced with Tcl/Tk.