Rating: 
Summary: A Definite Bargain, Very Well done!
Review: The negative reviews almost scared me away from this book. It was just what I was looking for. Perhaps some of the negative reviewers are too advanced for this book. If that is the case, I have to ask why they purchased the book in the first place. If you want to learn Perl/Tk, this is an excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs work
Review: There's all sorts of great ideas presented in this book, but there's no coherent structure. I would have prefered a book that went through building a few small useful applications, rather than being introduced to widget after widget after widget. In order to get help writing a complete application, it's necessary to skip through multiple sections of the book.Also, the idea that all of the properties for a widget have to be provided in the body of a chapter is ridiculous. Make 'em look in the Appendix! That what it's for! This book is extremely frustrating and I do recommend the "panther" book or the Perl Cookbook. -Doc
Rating: 
Summary: Superb introduction and basic reference
Review: This book did exactly what I wanted it to do. It's a very readable introduction with a clear, logical development of concepts, and it is also so thorough in its spelling out of all the options that it is also a good reference. I.e. it can be read sequentially or in random access mode. Missing are detailed discussions of Dialog and Message pop-up windows. Some people might find the constant spelling out of details a negative. But this is better than having to guess or search for info all the time. Examples are all minimal. I like this, because I hate wading through other people's over-lengthy code examples.
Rating:
Summary: Good Summary of Features, Poor Examples
Review: This book goes through the basic widgets thoroughly. It presents examples on how to use their options, how to use configure, etc. A decent reference. No mention of Tix, however. That said, this is not a tutorial on how to use perl/Tk. Examples are skimpy. For anyone who has read Kernighan & Ritchie's _The C Programming Language_ or (more to the point) Wall, Christiansen & Schwartz's _Programming Perl_ will be very frustrated at the complete absence of nontrivial examples. It would have been nice if the author had at least gone over some of the widget demo code distributed with perl/Tk, but she didn't. This book is definitely in the bottom half of O'Reilly's perl offerings. Wait for the second edition.
Rating: 
Summary: Good and Bad
Review: This book has some very good sections and some very poorly written sections. It merely gives you a 'bunch' of pieces and never tries to tie them together. Hopefully, a programming book, by a different author, will fill in the holes that this book was unable to cover.
Rating: 
Summary: Useless without examples
Review: This book is little more than a reference guide. It contains virtually no examples and often doesn't even explain how to implement some of the methods it teaches you. Exactly how do you pack widgets into a frame? Chapter 12 is devoted to frames and yet it never once tells you how to pack items into one. I eventually had to look this up in a friend's copy of "Advanced Perl Programming" (Chapter 14)! What's more amazing is that the book, somewhat perversely, goes into a verbose description of the options for each widget you can create. Why not put this at the end of the book in a table? That's what appendices are for! By far the best way to learn is by example and on this front, the book fails miserably. What a complete waste of money.
Rating:
Summary: too shallow to be useful
Review: This book will NOT help you produce anything useful with Perl/Tk. It is too shallow and too dry. A big disappointment. The fact that it has reached the sales rank it has (around 5000 as of this writing) is a sign of the thirst for a good Perl/Tk reference in the market. Too bad O'reilly wasted this chance. Hopefully they will do a better job next time. But you be careful and don't waste _your_ money with this book.
Rating:
Summary: An adequate reference
Review: This book would be more aptly titled "Perl/Tk: Lengthy Appendices, with Introduction". As some other reviewers have noted, the book presents the Perl/Tk interface in repetitive and extrodinary detail. Unfortunately, no concise summary of all this information exists on 1 or 2 pages, so the book fails to hold a niche as a desk reference. If you're looking for raw and useful code, you'll be disappointed for sure--the book consists of almost none. The in-text examples are short and trivial, rarely serving a useful or real world application. This would not be so bad, had the author included some complete (or perhaps even partial) solutions to the suggested exercises, found at the end of nearly every chapter. Unfortunately, such code is nowhere to be found. So what redeeming qualities does it have? I approached this book without experience with GUIs or Tk, and while learning Perl. Through the help of this book I've picked up the basics I need to create programs which allow for simple GUIs to make my programs accessible to those scared of the command line.
Rating:
Summary: Beginner's book; lacks substantive Perl/Tk code
Review: This is a book for Tk beginners. It does not fully explore the intricacies of widgets nor the dynamic interactions between widgets and the user. The author frequently mentions (briefly) what can or will happen but neglects to include Perl/Tk code to typify a working solution. Rather than tackle substantive problems herself, annoyingly she puts that burden on the reader under the guise of "Fun Things to Try" at the end of some chapters! The book would benefit from the inclusion of working solutions to these "fun" problems. As it stands, the book lacks substantive Perl/Tk code, leading me to wonder: has she written an end-user Perl/Tk application or is she just regurgitating the documentation? ....
Rating:
Summary: a pleasant introduction
Review: This is a great intro to perl/Tk: the examples are plentiful and cover a lot of ground; the organization is intuitive; and the writing is pretty good throughout. Yes, its examples aren't seriously in-depth, and yes, most readers probably will outgrow this book fairly rapidly, but isn't that the sign of a good beginner's "how-to" book?
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