Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (4th Edition)

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

Effective Tcl/Tk Programming : Writing Better Programs with Tcl and Tk (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

TCL/TK Pocket Reference

Tcl/Tk for Programmers: With Solved Exercises that Work with Unix and Windows

Tcl Tk

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

Format: Paperback
Author: Clif Flynt
ReleaseDate: 05 May, 2003
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Rating:

Like it says, a developer's guide.
The problems are of different levels of difficulty. The book is in textbook format, with problems to be worked at the end of each chapter. 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. .

Best book on Tcl programming
I could easily give this book 5 stars, but I try to use the entire rating scale. [I'm stingy in my ratings.]

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.

Excellent book for Tcl/Tk developers of all skill levels...
It works very well as an introduction to Tcl/Tk and as a reference guide for developers more experienced with Tcl/Tk. This book covers the Tcl language and the Tk toolkit in exhaustive detail.