Purpose: Bibliography and reviews of this book
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Author: [John Ousterhout]
 WWW book information: http://www.awl.com/cseng/titles/0-201-63337-X/
 Book's examples: ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/doc/book.examples.Z
 Book suppliment: http://www.tcl.tk/doc/tk4.0.ps
 Purchase online: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/020163337X/002-0310698-8669679
 Viewable (DRAFT): http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/john94tcl.html 
The book primarily covers Tcl 7.3 and Tk 3.6.

A German translation of this book, titled _Tcl und Tk_, with the ISBN of
3893197931, is also available.

While the book is a good intro to [Tcl], its basis on the older [Tk]
makes it difficult to use for some types of Tk development.  The tk4.0
porting guide is a PostScript document with a few of the issues. However, there have been many changes since Tk 3, particularly in Tk 8's cross -[latform] environment.

[Georg Fusz] With this book I was able to write my first [C]-expansion-functions. Reading in the book by Welsh was like running against a wall. I would suggest: Read first the book by Ousterhout and the book by Welch.



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With the release of Tcl 8, with [Unicode], new [regular expression]
support, Tcl Obj support in the [API], pseudo-compiler, etc. the
original book has less and less relevance as a full reference to
contemporary Tcl.
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"... less and less relevance ..." is a conservative statement.  [Jeffrey Hobbs],
for example, has strongly urged beginners against reliance on it, if not reading it (where's
that posting?).  His main point:  people miss out on so much--[fileevent]s, namespace]s, [binary] and Unicode capabilities, [socket], ...--that
make Tcl a valuable general-purpose programming language.

Still, there's something about the book that makes it very "fit" for me.
Some day I'd like to understand more precisely how it manages to be so readable
and inviting.

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[Larry Virden] writes: the two main problems I have with this book are:

   1.  Too much missing or deprecated info
   1.  Too much reliance on code fragments which do not show ''best practice'' techniques.

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Though not the most current, the chapter format and level *really* helped me get the concepts. --'''lh'''

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The book may be old, but it is extremely well-written.  I learned perl and python before starting tcl, and the way that JO's book is written is one of the best technical books I have ever read even when compared to the wealth of books written by a myriad of perl authors.  I have read JO's book over and over to get a feel for tcl/tk.  The content regarding sockets and the new facilities of tcl are easily learned by reading the manual pages, the wikis, and searching usenet archives.  The best thing to happen to tcl/tk would be an update to JO's book to include namespaces, and some of the new facilities.

On another note: Thank you to the core tcl team and to all who have participated in usenet in the past 5 years.  It makes for entertaining and informative reading.

I have decided to focus solely on tcl/tk until I can fake being a master at it ;D  No more perl, no more magic books, no more perl's dirty hooks!

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[Category Book]