Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk - Softcover

Welch, Brent B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130220280 ISBN 13: 9780130220288

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 1999

Synopsis

This is the third edition of Brent Welch's best-seller Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk. The book needs to be revised to cover Tcl/Tk 8.1., which will be made available.

About this title

Review

The continuing popularity of Tcl/Tk teaches us an important lesson in software language market adoption: early market share in an area of profound need with an easy-to-use product yields generations of loyal adherents. Long after opinion leaders in the GUI scripting community abandoned Tcl/Tk for more modern scripting languages, Tcl/Tk remains a major player, largely because of Brent Welch's encyclopaedic Practical Programming in Tcl/Tk, now entering its third edition and John Osterhout's lucid original text Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

Tcl/Tk survives despite its inelegance ("set x [expr 2 + 2]" rather than "x=2+2") because it was the first practical, well-documented, simple-to-implement solution to the crucial question, "How do I build a GUI for my C program?" Tcl/Tk is available for all major Windows and OS environments, including X11 (native Unix-like windows), Microsoft Windows and Macintosh.

Now with 40 pages of tables of contents, examples and charts, and another 40 pages of newly recompiled indices, Welch's new edition spans 55 chapters divided into seven sections. The sections are divided as follows: two for Tcl, three for Tk, one for the C library and one for updates in Tcl and Tk distributions and functionality. The third edition appears against a healthy backdrop of new Tcl/Tk development. Perhaps the proudest accomplishment of the Tcl community is TclHttpd (chapter 18), a Web server written largely in Tcl. The new server contributes to efforts to unclog the Web server bottlenecks by providing faster client routes to server-side applications while continuing to support the traditional--albeit slower--common gateway interface. The remainder of the book is not new, but it has been augmented and polished.

Welch has expanded discussions and added examples of Tcl's extensibility in C. Tcl/Tk's development scope has grown to include all POSIX internals, such as threads, sockets, TCP/IP interfaces and secure shells.

Recent Tcl/Tk releases enable meta-level execution through eval() and support for Web client plug-ins, all of which are detailed with examples and careful explanation. Functionally, Tcl/Tk lacks nothing compared to modern scripting languages, except lexical flexibility and object-orientated architecture. Nor does it add anything except familiarity, consistency and a long history of above-average documentation.

Welch perhaps wisely omits comparison with his competition, just as Dick Clark never mentions Howard Stern. It is beneath the dignity of ageing market leaders to look back--or even around. --Peter Leopold

From the Back Cover

2202H-5

The Tcl/Tk best-seller, now completely updated for Tcl 8.2 and the Tcl Web Server!

Tcl/Tk 8.2 is the first scripting language that can handle enterprise-wide integration tasks that encompass Windows, Solaris, Macintosh, and other key platforms. Now, in this fully updated Third Edition, Tcl/Tk development team member and best-selling author Brent Welch presents all you need to know to achieve powerful results with Tcl/Tk 8.2 and the new Tcl Web Server.

Coverage includes:

• Tcl's fundamental mechanisms and operating system interfaces
• Basic and advanced coding techniques and tools, including the Tcl script library facility
• Tk and X Windows-with detailed examples and sample widgets
• The new, extensible Tcl Web Server
• New Tcl internationalization features and thread support
• New techniques for working with regular expressions and namespaces

You'll find extensive coverage of user interface development, as well as application integration techniques that leverage Tcl/Tk's powerful cross-platform scripting capabilities. Welch covers Tcl's extensive network support, as well as Safe Tcl, C programming with the Tk toolkit, the Tcl compiler, and Tcl/Tk plug-ins for Netscape and Internet Explorer. Whether you're a current Tcl/Tk programmer, or a developer searching for a convenient, powerful multiplatform scripting language, Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, Third Edition delivers exactly what you're looking for.

"This is an excellent book, loaded with useful examples. Newcomers to Tk will find the widget descriptions particularly helpful." --John Ousterhout CEO and founder of Scriptics Corporation and the creator of Tcl/Tk

"Brent Welch fills an important need for an introduction to Tcl/Tk with an applied focus and with coverage of many of the useful extensions available . . . I recommend this book to my new students . . . and I keep a copy handy for my own use." --Joseph A. Konstan, Professor of Computer Science University of Minnesota

ABOUT THE CD-ROM

The accompanying CD-ROM includes the Tcl Web Server; Tcl/Tk distributions for Windows 9x/NT, Solaris, and Macintosh; plus an extensive collection of free Tcl/Tk software-including all the code from the book.

Art: Include the same boxed quotes that appeared on the 2e back cover.

Edition details

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0130220280
• ISBN 13: 9780130220288
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 832