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TITLE
| | Tcl/Tk for Real Programmers
| | EDITION
| | 1st
| | ISBN
| | 0-12-261205-1
| | AUTHOR(S)
| | Clif Flynt
| | PUBLISHER
| | AP Professional
| | PUBLISHED
| | 1999
| | LEVEL(S)
| | 3 and 4 [about levels]
| |
| | Order Tcl/Tk for Real Programmers from amazon.com
|
| SYNOPSIS |
Tcl/Tk for Real Programmers, by Clif Flynt, is a more than good enough book about a good enough language. It is rendered especially valuable by the attachment of a content-rich and well-organized CD-ROM. If you program or wish to program in Tcl/Tk and don't feel your resources are complete, your library needs this reference.
Tcl, pronounced "tickle" and short for "tool command language," was developed by John Ousterhout in the 1980s as an embeddable command interpreter designed as a virtual machine. Tk is the tool kit of GUI extensions that put Tcl/Tk in the position in UNIX that is occupied by Rexx and the Workstation Agent on the S/390, and by Visual Basic on Wintel. It's there for applications which must have a GUI but consist largely of non-GUI code, often composed of an extant non-Tcl application base, which Tcl is then used to script. On Linux, for instance, Tcl/Tk is used as a GUI wrapper around certain administrative tasks embodied in system commands and sbin shell scripts; on the other hand, Tcl/Tk is not generally used to author paint programs.
Tcl/Tk is like the mutt you get when the German Shepherd hops over the fence to the Basset Hound -- it's ugly but it's loyal, and it goes fetch like anybody's business. Tcl as a virtual machine has some points of favorable comparison to Java; Tcl as a language combines some of the more forgettable aspects of the C Shell with regrettable features of Rexx. An aesthete can wish nostalgically that Rexx had penetrated UNIX faster than it did; as an application automation language ObjectRexx (http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/orexx/) makes Tcl look like something old and in the way, sort of like RPG or Cobol.
But Tcl was there, was embeddable, and was, most importantly, free software -- source code included. It also looked more UNIX-y than the mainframe-derived literate programming Rexx language. Loyal, like we said: Tcl/Tk got all the casting calls from UNIX applet authors who needed an embeddable scripting language that was easy to learn and which reassuringly came provided with source.
A substantial corpus of code has grown up around Tcl/Tk. Sun Microsystems still has a team working specifically in support of this marvelously simple GUI applet idiom portable across UNIX, Wintel, and the Mac, among others. And John Ousterhout, who originally developed Tcl at the University of California at Berkeley before moving on to Sun, has launched his own company, Scriptics Corp. (http://www.scriptics.com/), which focuses on Tcl development tools. Dreams of loyalists that Tcl would displace Java as a platform for mobile code have faded somewhat; but with the wealth of useful Tcl/Tk libraries garnered over the years from UNIX/Linux/BSD working stiffs suggests that Tcl/Tk will be in common use for the next quarter-century.
Flynt has produced what must be the quintessential Tcl/TK pedagogic presentation. The print book is first-rate technical writing. Hurry past the burbling but entertaining preface, written by MIME coauthor Nathan Borenstein (http://ahimsa.guppylake.com/~nsb/), redolent with invocations of the beloved Anglo-California Buddhist mystic Alan Watts, larded with half-digested bits of Hegel, and you're on solid ground. Flynt's 680 pages are organized, orderly, extensively cross referenced, well proofread and technically reliable. It's also fun to accompany the book in the tclsh shell. It feels like learning Forth 20 years ago, but how powerful our desktop computers have grown since then!
The CD-ROM has reference cuts of the language; it has a wealth of tools and libraries; it has the examples from the book; it has quite a bit of extra reference material. It's an entire presentation in itself, including tutorials that allow the advanced reader to grasp the language by example and use the print book as a supplement to a primarily CD-ROM-driven course of study.
One exceptional thing about the whole presentation is Flynt's laconic style. He writes as dry as a bone. It's the style of someone who has been programming a long time and has seen many paradigms come and go. To a professional, it's painful to have to be taught; if you must be taught, you want a straight arrow like Flynt to teach you. He's knowledgeable, pleasant, pertinent, and nonsense-free.
The other thing that's exceptional about Tcl/Tk for Real Programmers is the coordination and complementary utility of the print book balanced by the CD-ROM. Publishers and authors of comparable computer technical efforts might well measure their own plans by the commendable opus delivered in the present instance by Flynt and Academic Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
| | Clif Flynt | Clif Flynt has been a professional programmer since 1978 and a Tcl advocate since 1994. He has developed Tcl applications for Internet commerce, factory control, computer based education, network analysis, games, firewall configuration, systems administration and more. Clif has taught computer science and delivered Tcl/Tk seminars in colleges and corporations around the world. He also writes a regular column about Tcl/Tk for :login; magazine. |
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