Rating: 
Summary: Who needs Java?
Review: After what seemed millenia waiting for its continually delayed publication, 'Learn Perl/Tk' has finally landed on Planet Amazon. And it was worth the wait. I've been playing with Perl/Tk ever since I found it lurking within 'Advanced Perl', and within one hour of ripping open the Worldmail cardboard, Nancy Walsh had solved an intractable problem I'd been suffering from, with her section on 'Embedding Widgets' on page 177. Other gems kept materialising throughout, which I'd spent many many hours trying to solve by myself (usually unsuccessfully). If I'd had this book six months ago, I now wouldn't have grey hairs, torn clothes and an appointment at the arthritis clinic for the state of my typing fingers. But although this superb introduction to Perl/Tk will soon have you knocking up programs in two days, it would take a share-optioned team of Java developers six months to produce, there's still a lot of mileage left in Mr O'Reilly's continuing exploitation of us Perl addicts. Expect to see 'Programming Perl/Tk' soon, followed by the 'Perl/Tk Cookbook', both offering even greater coverage of this superb GUI interface - if Mr Ing-Simmons needs co-writers then I'm available :-) . I know there are a lot of people within the Sun Microsystems culture who laugh at Perl/Tk, and think it's a bit of a joke; but the speed of development is incredible, like a heat-seeking sidewinder missile in comparison to a bow & arrow being fired at a warm cup of coffee. When someone comes up with the 'Perl Virtual Machine' applicable across all operating systems, Perl/Tk is going to simply blow Java off the face of the Planet Browser. So drop your thirteen heavy Sun manuals on AWT, Swing and all the other mouse listener nonsense, and start learning Perl/Tk. The Java is dead, long live the Perl/Tk.
Rating: 
Summary: 6 pages of information spread over 350 pages
Review: As my title implies, I was not thrilled with "Learning Perl/Tk". I learned more about Tk from "Perl, The Black Book" (Holzner) then I did from this book. The lack of helpful examples is astounding. I would not recommend it to anyone. In fact, I've just ordered "Graphical Applications with Tcl & Tk" (Foster-Johnson, OOP) and I am looking forward to finally learning Tk.
Rating:
Summary: 6 pages of information spread over 350 pages
Review: As my title implies, I was not thrilled with "Learning Perl/Tk". I learned more about Tk from "Perl, The Black Book" (Holzner) then I did from this book. The lack of helpful examples is astounding. I would not recommend it to anyone. In fact, I've just ordered "Graphical Applications with Tcl & Tk" (Foster-Johnson, OOP) and I am looking forward to finally learning Tk.
Rating:
Summary: Wait for the 2nd Edition
Review: DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!If you have the latest release of Perl/Tk(800.014), then wait for the next release of the book. I have experience programming in Perl, but none with Tk. Even the basic 'Hello World' program doesn't work. It is very frustrating. I called O'Reiley & Assoc. and they are now mailing me the 2nd edition, and admittedly stated the book is full of errors. I hate to wait longer, but I do appreciate how O'Reiley responded to the problem. If it wasn't for the incompatability issues, then I would rate this book as FOUR STARS! The content seems great for the beginning Tk enthusiast! Anyone who purchases the 2nd edition will be very happy....
Rating: 
Summary: A Pretty Good Book
Review: I agree with most of the reviewers here in that this is a decent book. It is a good first-time introduction. It also has lots of detailed information for advanced programmers, and it would be useful as a reference for real world GUI programming. But I would have liked to see many more simple examples to sort of get me jump started. This is apparently the first book anywhere on Perl/Tk programming--I guess you gotta start somewhere. My intuition is that Perl/Tk is going to be very popular. I hope more books on this subject are forthcoming soon.
Rating:
Summary: A very good reference, but not the best for a tutorial
Review: I bought this book with experience with GUI programming experience in both Windows and Linux, but had never really tried TCL/Tk. Perl being my latest obsession, I decided it was time to write some graphical front-ends for my scripts. As I scoped out the field, I reallized that the pickings were slim: only 3 books soley on the TK Perl module. Figuring I wasn't ready for the "Mastering Perl/TK", I bought the "Learning Perl/Tk" (with the Pocket Reference as well). Having finished and applied the knowledge I acquired from the book, I must say that the book leaves a rather strange "after-taste". While it is certainly sufficient for actually learning Perl/Tk, it really moves rather quickly and doesn't cover much in the full scheme of things. Will you be able to write pretty GUIs for your Perl scripts? Why of course, but don't expect to learn anything too complex. I found that this book alone is really not good for learning how to create complex GUIs that are on par with standard GUI APIs found on most desktop computers, and thus some online research is neccessary. On a more positive note, I really like the way the book is organized. Much better than "Programming Perl", "Learning Perl" or "Mastering Regular Expressions". Just about every other page has a code demonstration and screen shot of how one of the widgets/concepts is implemented. Very nice, when compared to standard O'reilly work. In a nutshell (no pun intended), "Learning Perl/Tk" is a good reference book that introduces Perl programmers to the Tk module, but really falls short of perfection by not demonstrating the practical integrating of Tk within a Perl script. If you have experience with TCL/Tk, buy "Mastering Perl/Tk" instead, but if you have no Tk/GUI experience, pick this one up and purchase "Mastering Perl/TK" after you have the basic/intermediate concepts down.
Rating: 
Summary: I could utilize Perl/Tk efficiency quickly from this book
Review: I do not share the many preceeding disappointed reviews on this book. This book gave me all I needed to work with Perl/Tk. I developped various GUI's (PC, Unix) with MSVC, MSVB, Smalltalk and even with a C Version on the Atari ST1040 years ago (a real pain). Perl/Tk's approach is the most simple approach I found so far with best ready-to-use functionality when you want to implement a functional GUI. The price to pay is that you need to envision the GUI first, rather than "drawing" it. The envision-part now is easier for me after reading this book. After reading this book I knew enough to implement various simple and complex GUIs. The one I'm proud of is a variable GUI, which changes it's look according to arguments passed by the commandline. (We will use this one to improve some business processes.) While doing so the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference is a 'friend' to the GUI-developper, as some specific parts can be found faster there than in this book. I admit, some Perl-specific syntactical constructs from Perl/Tk's syntax I had to become used to. I better understood these after reading Srinivasan's "Advanced Perl Programming". GUI-developpment is hardly ever an easy-going task, if you want to do more than an on-the-fly job. On the average, I spent 90-95% of time for the graphical input and output before the interesting 5-10% of the programs real task can become alive. With Perl/Tk I could reduce the GUI-part to about 75-90%, thanks to this book. A good program and a good GUI is the result of prior ambitious and clever problem analysis. Once you know what you want to implement you'll find all you need to know HOW to implement all the GUI-stuff right here in this book. If this book had a quick reference just like the pocket guide it would be perfect for me. BTW: this book is one of the few I can read in my noisy office.
Rating:
Summary: I found it useful
Review: I found this book to be a useful cross between a typical "Learning" book and a reference manual. It does walk you through widget by widget, but every chapter is laid out the same way, so it's easy to skim once you discover the pattern. I was already a little familiar with Tcl/Tk, and mostly needed a refresher on what the widgets were, and how to use them within Perl. I have never used the object-oriented style of Perl programming, and this book also made a good introduction to that. Throughout this book, if you do read it page by page, are many "hidden bits" of information based on the author's experience, which saved me a lot of time versus learning it all the hard way. GUI design in general is a huge topic, and way out of scope for a book like this. I already had my interface designed on paper, and just needed some help getting it implemented on the screen. This book gave me what I needed to do that.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: I had programmed in perl and, briefly, tcl/tk but never perl/tk before buying this book. Nancy Walsh has made the transition seamless. Previous knowledge of tk is not even neccessary, only a basic understanding perl is required. Any budding perl programmer who has just finished an introductory perl book such as Learning Perl (also from O'Reilly) will breeze through Learning Perl/Tk. Ms. Walsh presents the Tk module in a clear, concise manner with ample examples littered throughout the text. This book will have you programming GUIs from within perl in no time at all...and you'll have FUN doing it too!
Rating:
Summary: Useful and reasonably complet, with a pleasant reading style
Review: I have a copy of the March 1999 printing (not quite a second edition). The complaints that I read about in the first printing seem to have been corrected. I produced my first practice Perl/Tk window in less than 1/2 hour from the time I opened "Learning Perl/Tk". Like most software books, better examples of programming style would help to produce more standardized code. Also while features are discussed, the relative trades offs of differnt approaches are not really explored (e.g. when to use pack, grid or place; when to use a check box verses an option; when a window is busy enough and a new window should be created). In spite of having never done any Tcl, I was able to make my first test screen within 1/2 hour of opening the took. Though I consider the Camel book (Programming Perl) and the Panther book (Advanced Perl Programming) necessary reference books, I probably actually spend more time wandering through "Learning Perl.Tk" and "Teach yourself PERL 5 in 21 days".
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