Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

by John K. Ousterhout

The Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit, a programming environment for creating graphical user interfaces under X Windows together represent one of the most exciting innovations in X Window System programming. Because Tcl and Tk are so easy to learn, extremely powerful, and contain sophisticated features, they have dramatically reduced development time for thousands of X programmers.
Written by the creator of Tcl and Tk, this book is the single authoritative resource for anyone who wants to work with this extraordinary environment. The book offers an introduction and overview of Tcl and Tk and then presents detailed instructions for script writing in Tcl and working with the Tk toolkit.
You will discover how Tk's windowing shell, wish, enables you to develop window-based applications with amazingly few lines of code. You will also find information on Tk's novel and powerful facility for linking applications. Many other features are also described, such as Tk's hypertext and hypergraphics widgets and Tcl's facilities for procedures, list management, and subprocess execution.
For interested readers, the book also describes the C interfaces for Tcl and Tk, showing how to extend their built-in features by writing new C commands.
Upon reading this book, you will learn how to produce far more powerful X Windows System applications in a fraction of the time that used to be required.

Genres: Programming, Computers

480 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 1994

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hardly worth it.

Each chapter is a tedious listing of all the functions which are related to chapter topic. Only after the listing is there any explanation of the use of the previously listed function, and not really much there.

Ot would have been much better if it had been organized so as to remove all of the function lists to an appendix and to keep only the examples and their descriptions in the chapters and provide more examples.

[Nguyen Thanh · Rating 1 out of 5]

A good book

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written in 1994. Tcl has seen a number of important changes since then. Some of the later examples in the book will not work with current versions of Tcl because of changes to the language. The core language section (pages 1-142) is still completely valid and is merely missing information. The existing information is not wrong.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I would like to heap some praise:

First, I think Tcl is an interesting language and it's worth learning. It has one of the tiniest sets of core language rules I've ever seen (outside of Turing tarpit languages such as Befunge or Brainfuck). Programmers coming from other languages are in for a bit of a jarring experience (those "{" and "}" characters are NOT doing what you think they are doing!). Once you've finally learned and absorbed the rules, you know all of Tcl's syntax. There are no surprises in the syntax - only suprises in your understanding of the rules.

Second, John Ousterhout has done an excellent job of introducing the Tcl language in a way that makes it very accessible. I was really impressed with the presentation of the language in the introduction and the first couple chapters. It's very clean and clear writing. You will understand the core Tcl language by the time you're done with the first section of the book.

Third, Addison Wesley is one of my favorite computer book publishers. The organization of the book is very logical and clear. The index is excellent. The tables used to summarize the core Tcl commands are clear and consistent. The whole book gives me a feeling of quality and care.

The information really starts to fall apart in Part III: Writing Tcl Applications in C. The examples will not work with modern Tcl. I'm sure the explanations are very good, but without updating, it's difficult to follow along.

You'll either want another book to get yourself up to speed with what's new in Tcl, or you can cobble together that information yourself using online resources.

Parts I (and probably II) of this book still make a great introduction.