Learning Perl/Tk (Paperback)

by Nancy Walsh (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
By combining the rough-and-ready Perl language with the graphical user interface (GUI) capabilities of the Tk toolkit, Perl/Tk makes it easy to write event-based GUI applications quickly--once you know what you're doing. Learning Perl/Tk shows you how to build GUIs with everyone's favorite public-domain programming language. This book focuses only on GUIs--it leaves in-depth exploration of the Perl language to other books. (Learning Perl is the best of that genre.)

Assuming only a basic familiarity with Perl, Learning Perl/Tk shows you what you need to know to create graphical front ends for Perl programs. Author Nancy Walsh starts with a quick orientation, showing you how to set up Perl/Tk and giving you some simple examples of what GUI source code looks like. Then, she details the use and functions of geometry managers, which the Tk module uses to arrange interface elements. From there, she explores each widget individually, showing how to use buttons, checkbuttons, radiobuttons, labels, entries, and more. She also addresses event handlers. Her discussion of each widget is clear and liberally sprinkled with examples.

One appendix lists the default values of the Tk widgets in tabular form; another spotlights the differences among versions of Perl and Tk for various operating systems. A final appendix explores the font-management capabilities of Tk 8.0. This book doesn't come with a companion disk, and it would be nice to have the examples available locally. However, the publisher maintains a library of related files on its Web site. --David Wall

Product Description
This tutorial for Perl/Tk, the extension to Perl for creating graphical user interfaces, shows how to use Perl/Tk to build graphical, event-driven applications for both Windows and UNIX. With Tk, Perl programs can be window-based rather than command-line based, with buttons, entry fields, listboxes, menus, and scrollbars. Anyone who has written even the simplest Perl program should be able to learn Tk from this book. It gets right to the point of what you need to know and why, teaching how to implement and configure each Perl/Tk graphical element. Numerous illustrations demonstrate how each element is drawn and how its configuration options affect its presentation. Learning Perl/Tk is for every Perl programmer who would like to implement simple, easy-to-use graphical interfaces.

Product Details

• Paperback: 376 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly; 1 edition (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565923146
• ISBN-13: 978-1565923140
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #503,679 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Needs work, March 7, 2000

By	Doc (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

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

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dont Bother: get the panther book instead to learn perl/tk, May 12, 1999

By A Customer

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

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful and reasonably complet, with a pleasant reading style, October 14, 1999

By	Doug Claflin ([e-mail]) (greater Boston Ma.) - See all my reviews

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".