Purpose: Bibliography and reviews of this book
Author: John Ousterhout Publication date: 1994 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 [L1 ] 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-platform 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.
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.
"... 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--fileevents, namespaces, 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.
Larry Virden writes: the two main problems I have with this book are:
Though not the most current, the chapter format and level *really* helped me get the concepts. --lh
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!
There is work afoot in early 2005 to update this book with a second edition. Jeff Hobbs announced at the Thirteenth Annual Tcl/Tk Conference that this book is on the way and will include up-to-date knowledge on Tcl/Tk 8.5. The rewrite is done by Ken Jones.
DWW Amazon.com is showing the second edition to be released July 2007.
SYStems and here is the link [L2 ], but I find it very weird, as far as I know John Ousterhout is no longer involved with Tcl, at least he is not contributing any code. So on what basis will he make a new version of this book, and why around the end of 2007, is it so to include Tile and OO? Finally I believe if John Ousterhout got re-engaged working on Tcl it might help a lot in Tcl marketing. He is high profile!
LV 2007 August 10 Well, today I searched Amazon.com and the previously mentioned link is now dead, and no second edition of the book appears on that site. So, I next went to http://www.awprofessional.com/ (which apparently is really just a redirect to http://www.informit.com ). They show 3 books when searching for Tcl. Practical Programming, Effective Tcl/Tk Programming, and the PostgreSQL Developer's handbook.
No new editions of any of these are listed. Their "other things you might like" sidebar lists a java book, a web tech book, and a networking book. All of which are several years old.
Well here is the link again [L3 ]. There are a number of sites now showing this, including Amazon UK and so on. The ISBN number is ISBN-10: 032133633X, ISBN-13: 978-0321336330. Still nothing on the AW Professional website.
Ok, so here it is, totally official! A second edition updated to cover Tcl 8.5 and indeed co-written by the creator of Tcl! [L4 ]