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

Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (4th Edition)

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

TCL/TK Pocket Reference

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

Tcl Tk

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

Format: Paperback
Author: J. Adrian Zimmer
ReleaseDate: 27 August, 1998
Publisher: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr
Rating:

The best programming book I've ever read
It's not a "learn Tcl in 7 days" book. Mind you, as the title suggests, this shouldn't be your very first experience programming. You want to have some other languages under your belt first. It's aimed at someone who will digest a lot of information fairly quickly. The writing is fun and humorous. The very first chapters are essential, as Zimmer does everything he can to explain the nuts and bolts behind braces, quotes and variable substitutions. He uses these core pieces of Tcl in ways you will likely never encounter in actual Tcl/Tk programs, but serves the purpose of breaking them, soliciting head-scratchingly unintuitive results, etc. so that when you start coding yourself, you wil know to be careful with your syntax-- know what the pitfalls are and avoid them. If you are patient enough to go through all of the exercises, you will have a very strong and solid understanding of this fantastically elegant and programmer-friendly language. The only part I don't like is that the index at the back of the book is too brief. The book partly makes up for this by having 2 more indices used to locate specific functions and procedures. I recommend you also invest in the O'Reilly Nutshell or Pocket Guide books, because this book is more tutorial than reference in nature.

toilet paper
. It was useful as toilet paper, but not much else.

only for intermediate/advanced programmers
The main likable aspect is that Zimmer gets right into the language; no long history or touchy-feely introduction. This book definitely has its pros and cons. If you've done some programming and are comfortable with typical flow-of-control structures, expression syntax, and have done some shell programming on Unix platforms, you will quickly get a handle on Tcl with this book.

However, Zimmer uses some unusual verbiage (eg. , "action families"), and expects the reader to understand quite a bit already. Given that the content organization is a little strange, and that the index is brief, it is difficult to quickly dive in and create useful scripts.

Lastly, on any given topic, the book covers the basic concepts then immediately proffers exercises (for which solutions are given at the back of the chapter). If you work thru this book from start to finish and do the exercises, you will value this book. Personally, I despise exercise-based books; I prefer authors who bring the material to me via explanations and well-documented examples. If I wanted to learn strictly by doing, I'd download the spec and figure it out for myself.