This page considers what software should be put in front of newcomers to the language.
Differs for different platforms - as well as for different intersets.
- C compiler (and CriTcl?) - needed to build non-script extensions
- GNU autoconf (only needed if a) you are building your own TEA compliant extensions or b) you need to generate the configure script from a CVS repository snapshot, I think)
- Some sort of text editor (See [Tcl Editors))
- Tcl - the place to learn hello, world
- Tcl Tutor - a good tutorial for intro to Tcl
- Tk - the place to learn it graphically
- Tkcon - a recommended user interface
- Tcllib - a good collection of useful Tcl code
- Tclapps - some example tcl scripts - the most important of which is tkchat!
- TclX - a lot of useful Unix-like extras
- Expect - very useful to automate command line apps, also some nice debugging tools
- Img - very useful to display various image types
- Snack - sound generation
- Some sort of database Oratcl, etc.
- TclPro for visual debugger, static checker, binary wrapper
- Frink is another static checker
- tclvfs is in my opinion going to be a must have extension, for doing useful new things simply
- Thread is an extension to make simple threads available to the Tcl programmer
- Tcldom/Tclxml,and the rest of the family if you are going to be doing xml work.
- incr Tcl or one of the other object oriented extensions if you are going to be writing code of much complexity or size
- BLT, Tix, or one of the other megawidget/addon widget extensions
- The sample Tcl extension to show you how to organize a TEA compliant extension
Many/most of these are in ActiveTcl - however, not all platforms are supported by Activestate.
[ ActiveTcl, TclKit, Kitten, SmallTcl, ...]
- C compiler
- GNU autoconf (???)
- Some sort of text editor
- Tcl - the place to learn hello, world
- TkTutor - a good tutorial for intro to Tcl
- Tk - the place to learn it graphically
- Tkcon - a good interface
- Tcllib - a good collection of useful Tcl code
- QuickTimeTcl - interface to QuickTime
"Is there anything I should know before I start coding"
JCW - a plea: please also consider making some zlib implementation interface "standard" - its absence is preventing several valuable uses (mounting a ZIP with TclVFS, for example)