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

~ (Author) "Your first question is likely to be "What features will Td/Tk offer me that other languages won't?..." (more)
Key Phrases: ncr tcl, problems review the material, upvar command, Supported Platforms, Tree Array, Primary Site (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Clif's book is both a pleasure to read and a useful reference...I'm sure you'll find it a necessary addition to your professional toolkit."—Marshall T. Rose

“The best computer programmers are astonishingly more productive than average. One reason is that they use good tools, and they use them well. Clif Flynt helps you improve your effectiveness as a developer in both of these ways. Want to take your programming to the next level? Get Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide, Second Edition.”—Cameron Laird, vice president, Phaseit, Inc., and author of the “Regular Expressions” online column. -- Review

Review

"The best computer programmers are astonishingly more productive than average. One reason is that they use good tools, and they use them well. Clif Flynt's Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide, Second Edition helps you improve your effectiveness as a developer in both of these ways. Tcl is a software language with a great return on investment-it achieves portable, powerful, economical results with great economy. Just a few lines of Tcl are enough to create applications that are both interesting and useful.
Clif draws on his deep experience as a front-line developer to help you get the most out of Tcl. He writes clearly, and has organized his book with instructive examples that teach the essentials of Tcl. He covers the right material too: Tcl/Tk packs in not just such long-standing Tcl strengths such as its easy networking and graphical user interface, but also the latest breakthroughs with internationalization, widget upgrades, and StarPacks.
Want to take your programming to the next level? Get Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide, Second Edition."
-Cameron Laird is vice president of Phaseit, Inc. (http://phaseit.net), where he specializes in Rapid Enterprise Integration with Tcl and related tools. His frequent publications on information technology include the popular "Regular Expressions" column (http://regularexpressions.com).

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Product Details

• Paperback: 758 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 2 edition (May 19, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558608028
• ISBN-13: 978-1558608023
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #642,041 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best book on Tcl programming, February 20, 2004

By	C. Dunn "independent thinker" (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

[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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Like it says, a developer's guide., November 2, 2005

By	Stephen A. Lajoie (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars This book led me toward know what questions I need to ask and solutions for many, March 1, 2009

By	Frank Motta "fmotta" (Fremont, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.