Customer Reviews

Tcl/Tk in A Nutshell

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

 

 

The previous reviewers seemed to think that this book would teach them the way of TCL/TK and were thoroughly disappointed. But what they failed to realize that this book is meant to be nothing more then a reference book. Perhaps if they had paid attention to the product description, they would have been prepared.

A thing to keep in mind, anytime an O'Reilly book has "...in a Nutshell" after the title... it's a reference book. Pure and simple. Say it with me, people. R-E-F-E-R-E-N-C-E. Not to be confused with "Master TCL/TK in 24 hours" or what have you.

So, keeping that in mind, as a reference book, it does a fantastic job as the rest have stated. Makes for a good "dictionary" so to speak.

this is the tcl book i keep handiest, even though it doesn't offer me much of anything beyond the manual pages. what it does offer is a compendium of tcl, tk, expect, tix, blt, itcl, itk, tclx, and the like's references.

i've always been disappointed in tcl's online documentation. you can easily reproduce the lion's share of this book by just printing out the manual pages. however, having them bound and handy can be a relief. it does include some sample code (which you can typically find online), adding some value.

it's a nutshell book, though, and nutshell books are typically like this. o'reilly's had this series for years and they've always been of questionable value for some people (myself included). you wont learn a language this way, you wont even improve your programming this way, you'll just have a handy printed reference manual. i haven't yet found it to be incorrect (but i didn't go looking), so that's got to say something.

don't pay full price for this one.

This book really needs to be updated for the latest version of Tcl/Tk, as there have been a number of important additions since it was published in 1999. For example, all the new string commands and regular expression enhancements added in 8.1, the new file operations added in 8.3, and the new list commands added in 8.4, not to mention all the new Tk widgets (e.g. spinbox, panedwindow). To learn about all the new features, I'd recommend that you get the latest version of Brent Welch's "Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk" instead. The documentation that comes with Tcl/Tk is the ultimate authority, and is basically what this Nutshell book consists of, albeit for the old 8.0 version. It's basically just a copy of the old manual pages.

I think this book is just too old to be useful anymore, especailly since if you have Tcl/Tk installed then you already have all the current documentation. And there are virtually no examples given. The Chapter on The Tcl C Interface is basically the contents of the tcl.h header file. One reason I give it 2 stars instead of just 1 is that it does have some chapters on some popular Tcl/Tk extensions, like Expect, Tclx, Tix and Blt, even though they're pretty much just the manual pages for those extensions.

If you need some hand-holding and are just getting started with TCL then this book is not for you. Tcl/TK in a nutshell is exactly what the title says, a desktop quick reference.
Don't expect many examples or explanations.

Compared to Perl / C style languages TCL is a little weird to look at and takes some getting used to. And it's easy to get tripped up if you aren't already experienced with the language. A lot of the material in the book doesn't go any deeper than the TCL man pages. So beginners, get a different book / tutorial to learn the language.

If you are proficient in TCL than this book would make a great reference, but as a beginner (to TCL, not to programming) a lot of times I had to supplement what the book gave by searching the web for examples to making things clearer. But it is definitely useful for looking up rarely used / obscure commands that you may have forgotten.

Even though the book lacks a lot of examples and hand holding it is very comprehensive and covers a lot of material.

An excellent reference for Tcl, Tk, the C interfaces, Expect, [IncrTcl/Tk], Tix, TclX, BLT, OraTcl, SybTcl, & TclOdbc. Sure it doesn't cover everything that everyone will use, but that's not really possible.

My only real complaint has to do with the books formatting. For most commands, the formatting is fine, but for commands with subcommands (such as string), the subcommands are unnecessarily hard to read.

With that one exception, this is my favorite Tcl Book.

The book has lots of information but one has to go through lots to loops to get to where the information should be and then it may not be there.

E.g., the index has no mention of the 'wm' command--one that I often encounter.

E.g., another book implies that there is a canvas command 'delete all'. After I finally got to page 61, I found the 'delete' command but NOT any hint that one can use the 'all' command to delete all the objects on the canvas.

Another example, even though the book purports to cover TK--the visual side of the language--I find just one chart, .

Needless to say, there are very few examples.

As a reference goes, this is pretty good. I've noticed a certain hit or miss aspect of the O'Reilly Nutshell series. This one is more of a hit for me personally. Still, I'm already bumping into things I wish this book covered. stooop, for one thing. There isn't much here that you won't find in the online documentation, but it can be very nice to have a paper copy.

Basically, this book was what I was expecting it to be. Nothing more, nothing less.

The guys at O'Reilly have come up with a fairly decent reference for TCL/Tk. It covers a lot of info about the script (core language, various interfaces, and Expect). But, they forgot the most important interface of all: Jacl - the Java interface for TCL. I use this part of the lanuage all of the time. Java is so popular, I don't understand how they could miss such an important feature. It is still a good book, but only 3 stars this time. Maybe they will get it right in the next edition.

I usually find O'Reilly books excellent but this one is a disppointment. You could print out the Tcl manual pages and get as much information. Examples are few and meager. There should at least be a brief primer, with examples, to get the reader accustomed to the Tcl way of doing things. There's a tips and hints chapter at the end that's good, but it's all too short.

I bought this book thinking I would get a good primer/reference book on Tcl. It might be useful for reference, but is almost useless for people new to the language. Out of 440 pages, only 46 are for Tcl and mostly it's a just a brief summary of commands. Think of trying to learn English using only a dictionary. This book is like that dictionary. Also, there are almost no examples on how to use any of the commands.