Rating:  Summary: Start with this book, then move on. Review: This is a great start-up book. It gives you a good understanding of what Perl/Tk does. It also touches on a lot of the functionality. I went from knowing that there was something called Perl/Tk to writing a nice little gui in two days. Try that with Java. The minuses are that this book just touches on a bunch of stuff I want to know a lot more about (ie. Frames, Toplevel widgets). It also needs many, many more examples. Use this book to get started and then use it with actual code examples for real programming.
Rating:  Summary: Good tutorial Review: This is a solid tutorial that goes through the most important components in Tk and contains good illustrations. You won't become an expert (see that word "Learning" in the title?), and the writing is clear but not spectacular. Before getting this book I tried to read up on Tk on the web and spent many hours trying to get a simple text component to do my bidding. After having read this book, it took me an hour to get the entire app done. Don't repeat my mistake; get this book if you do Perl/Tk!
Rating:  Summary: Good tutorial Review: This is a solid tutorial that goes through the most important components in Tk and contains good illustrations. You won't become an expert (see that word "Learning" in the title?), and the writing is clear but not spectacular. Before getting this book I tried to read up on Tk on the web and spent many hours trying to get a simple text component to do my bidding. After having read this book, it took me an hour to get the entire app done. Don't repeat my mistake; get this book if you do Perl/Tk!
Rating:  Summary: Propper but simplistic Review: When comparing to "Efficient Tcl/Tk Programming" for Tcl or "Python and Tkinter Programming" for Python, this book is very mediocre. Still it helped me to get into Perl/Tk, but it has the same smell as the Solaris books from Sun, where the authors don't know about the daily reality of the programmer or admin. Use it for a start, but then we should force O'Reilly to produce something like the above mentioned books.
Rating:  Summary: Inconsistent and confusing in places Review: While I'll give the Perl/Tk book a place on my bookshelf, I'm left wondering about the author's mastery of Perl/Tk and technical writing in general.There are too many places where her use of variables is not consistent from example to example. Similarly, some of the more interesting parts of the package (menus, for example) are brushed over without complete documentation. To wit: 'Adding a Cascade Menu' .. "... assume we already created $menu_more". Which left me wondering "what does $menu_more LOOK like?! Similarly, 'Displaying a Cascading Menu' .. "$menu->postcascade(index)" .. nowhere is "index" explained. Is it an array slice, is it an index name, is it a hash key?! All in all, if you've never played with Perl/Tk before, get this book - it does deserve shelf space. If you're expecting a down and dirty reference and example manual to augment your existing Perl/Tk knowledge, print out the POD and test.pl scripts and save your money.
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