TCL/TK Pocket Reference

Exploring Expect (Nutshell Handbooks)

Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk (4th Edition)

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

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

Tcl Tk

Tcl/Tk in A Nutshell

Format: Paperback
Author: Paul Raines
ReleaseDate: 15 May, 1999
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Rating:

Good reference for Tcl/Tk 8.0, but now outdated
For example, all the new string commands and regular expression enhancements added in 8. This book really needs to be updated for the latest version of Tcl/Tk, as there have been a number of important additions since it was published in 1999.1, the new file operations added in 8. 3, and the new list commands added in 8. 4, not to mention all the new Tk widgets (e. g. spinbox, panedwindow). To learn about all the new features, I'd recommend that you get the latest version of Brent Welch's "Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk" instead. The documentation that comes with Tcl/Tk is the ultimate authority, and is basically what this Nutshell book consists of, albeit for the old 8. 0 version. It's basically just a copy of the old manual pages.

I think this book is just too old to be useful anymore, especailly since if you have Tcl/Tk installed then you already have all the current documentation. And there are virtually no examples given. The Chapter on The Tcl C Interface is basically the contents of the tcl. h header file. One reason I give it 2 stars instead of just 1 is that it does have some chapters on some popular Tcl/Tk extensions, like Expect, Tclx, Tix and Blt, even though they're pretty much just the manual pages for those extensions.

Disorganized, incomplete, and unfriendly

E. The book has lots of information but one has to go through lots to loops to get to where the information should be and then it may not be there.g. , the index has no mention of the 'wm' command--one that I often encounter.

E. g. , another book implies that there is a canvas command 'delete all'. After I finally got to page 61, I found the 'delete' command but NOT any hint that one can use the 'all' command to delete all the objects on the canvas.

Another example, even though the book purports to cover TK--the visual side of the language--I find just one chart, .

Needless to say, there are very few examples.

Good reference, not so good for beginners
Tcl/TK in a nutshell is exactly what the title says, a desktop quick reference. If you need some hand-holding and are just getting started with TCL then this book is not for you.
Don't expect many examples or explanations.

Compared to Perl / C style languages TCL is a little weird to look at and takes some getting used to. And it's easy to get tripped up if you aren't already experienced with the language. A lot of the material in the book doesn't go any deeper than the TCL man pages. So beginners, get a different book / tutorial to learn the language.

If you are proficient in TCL than this book would make a great reference, but as a beginner (to TCL, not to programming) a lot of times I had to supplement what the book gave by searching the web for examples to making things clearer. But it is definitely useful for looking up rarely used / obscure commands that you may have forgotten.

Even though the book lacks a lot of examples and hand holding it is very comprehensive and covers a lot of material.