Mastering Perl/Tk (Paperback)

by Stephen O. Lidie (Author), Nancy Walsh (Author)
Key Phrases: creating items, exit button, square widget, Creating Custom Widgets, Pure Perl, Hello World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Perl/Tk, the marriage of Perl with the Tk toolkit, allows you to build Perl programs with an attractive, intuitive GUI interface. Mastering Perl/Tk is the one and only book you need for learning Perl/Tk and for mastering the techniques of experienced Perl/Tk programmers. The first half of the book contains the basics on how to use Perl/Tk, with coverage of all the standard widgets and a thorough tutorial of the geometry managers. Mastering Perl/Tk then branches out into advanced applications, including extensive program examples. The result is a book accessible for novices, and invaluable for experienced programmers ready to learn the next step in the elegant and effective use of Perl/Tk. Nancy Walsh is the author of Learning Perl/Tk and Steve Lidie is the author of the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference and a series of Perl/Tk articles in The Perl Journal. Together, they have written Mastering Perl/Tk to be the definitive guide to Perl/Tk.

About the Author
Steve Lidie has spent decades consulting, programming and administering systems from Apple, CDC, DEC, HP, IBM, Microsoft and SGI. Author of the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference and graduate of Lehigh University, he currently manages the University's large-scale scientific computing complex, and occasionally writes Tk articles for The Perl Journal and PerlMonth.

Nancy Walsh has been involved with Perl (and Perl/Tk) since 1996. She received a Computer Science degree from the University of Arizona in 1993, and currently works as a Principal Consultant for XOR, Inc. doing J2EE and Java work on various projects. Nancy has taught several Perl/Tk Tutorials at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and is also the author of Learning Perl/Tk.

Product Details

• Paperback: 746 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.; 1st edition (January 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565927168
• ISBN-13: 978-1565927162
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #319,750 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent reference., February 10, 2002

By A Customer

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Get this one INSTEAD of 'Learning Perl/Tk', not in addition to, August 8, 2005

By	David N. Smith (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A nice introduction, but not a reference, April 26, 2002

By	Timothy D. Shoppa (Bethesda, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.