Version 195 of Online Tcl and Tk Tutorials

Updated 2013-09-15 12:46:35 by APN

Purpose

Document various useful online or interactive Tcl and Tk tutorials. The official Tcl tutorial is discussed at tcltutorial.

These lists have been organized into "tutorial" order, i.e., the order a reader might access them in for most efficient learning. This order takes into account both the quality of the tutorial and the complexity of the information it presents.

Note: This ordering was undertaken on 2012-08-22, and updated on 2013-03-08

Please help collaboratively bubble-sort this list by choosing two consecutive references, evaluating their content, and swapping their order if appropriate! New links should be added at the top of a list to give them the benefit of the doubt, after which, the bubble-sort process will hopefully take them to their proper place

General purpose

Title/Link Description Note
Tcl Tutorial by Jan Bodnar. Exceptionally clear and readable
The official Tcl Tutorial A Tcl 8.5 tutorial written by Clif Flynt, Neil Madden, Arjen Markus, David Welton and others. The tutorial is intended as a companion to the Tcl manual pages which provide a reference for all Tcl commands. It was written with the goal of helping those who have some knowledge of programming, although they certainly don't have to be experts.
http://www.invece.org/tclwise/ Tclwise: Guide to the Tcl programming language, by Salvatore Sanfilippo. This book is an introduction to the main ideas of the Tcl programming language: If you wish to learn a simple and powerful programming language, this book is for you. RS highly recommends this - when reading it, I more than once thought, "wish I had written that myself..." :)
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tcl_Programming A wikibooks complete and free Tcl/Tk book/tutorial with nice examples by Richard Suchenwirth
http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/index.adp Tcl for Web Nerdy, by Philip Greenspun, An intro to Tcl using AOLServer as the web engine. Some additional tutorials are mentioned in the summary
Tool Command Language by Jan Newmarch
Tcl Scripting with nmrWish last updated 2009-09-14
http://tcl.projectforum.com/young a work in progress providing a tutorial for young people.
Beginning Tcl An interactive community project to teach Tcl scripting On this wiki
Arts and Crafts of Tcl-Tk Programmingand another index to introductory pages, or pages covering fundamental concepts. On this wiki
Intermediate Tclan intermediate tutorial composed of pages on this wiki
Advanced Tclanother, more advanced tutorial composed of pages on this wiki
Superlinux Video Tutorials Youtube playlists in Arabic and English, of video tutorials Superlinux on his channel ( ranixlb ) . More than 36 episodes of tutorials. Install this Android application
http://www.ardenstone.com/projects/seniorsem/tcl/ A Non-Programmer's Introduction to Tcl/Tk Stuck with pre-2005 practices, but the basics have changed little since then.
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/oldtutor/ Learning to program by Alan Gauld is aimed at non-programmers. While the principle illustration language is Python, he also gives examples in Tcl (included with Python distributions) and Basic.
http://www.cwflynt.com/CS146GameLab/ Clyf Flynt's Tcl Tutorial
http://www.icanprogram.com/09tk/main.html icanprogram website
http://www.bin-co.com/tcl/tutorial/contents.php An online tutorial written by Binny V Abraham.
http://www.doulos.com/knowhow/tcltk/ Doulos offers a 3-day Essential Tcl/Tk instructor led class
Tcl Tutor an interactive tutorial for learning Tcl Recent versions cover only Tcl, not Tk
http://www.bin-co.com/tcl/tutorial/ a tutorial for Tcl/tk beginners. The Tk part begins here [L1 ]
http://www.purl.org/NET/Tcl-FAQ/ has a variety of pointers to tutorials
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/msg/7f593de071477d64 Roy Terry recommends a particularly experimental trajectory.
http://www.phaseit.net/claird/comp.lang.tcl/tcl_tutorials.html contains pointers to a varity of tutorials
ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/doc/tut.tar.Z A series of PostScript slides used in an introduction/tutorial on Tcl and Tk at several X and Usenix Conferences
http://jbenjamin.org/docs/tcl.html A Tcl/Tk and Expect Tutorial by Will Morse (mailto:[email protected] )
http://www.icanprogram.com/
http://www.icanprogram.com/09tk/main.html
free online (beginner level) programming courses using Tcl/Tk as a programming language
http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/%7Edbutler/tutorials/winter96/tcl/ A short Tcl & Tk tutorial by Alex Samonte
http://photo.net/ filled with interesting information for the Tcl programmer. For instance, http://photo.net/sql/ appears to be a working draft of a book initially called "SQL for Web Nerds". It is a tutorial on SQL, using the AOLserver as a base and Tcl as the programming language. There are other items such as http://photo.net/wtr/dead-trees/ , which is the web version of the book "Database Backed Web Sites". Then there is the ArsDigita Community System, a database driven web forum.
http://user.xmission.com/~georgeps/documentation/tutorials/ George Peter Staplin GPS has written some tutorials on how he uses movies, audio, images and PNG cursors with Tcl/Tk in a game he is writing.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TclTk-HOWTO.html A rather old document oriented towards Tcl/Tk 8.0 Perhaps one of the Linux users here on the wiki would consider updating http://cvs.tldp.org/go.to/LDP/LDP/howto/linuxdoc/TclTk-HOWTO.sgml?revision=HEAD&view=markup and then submit the changes back to tldp.org ?
http://hegel.ittc.ukans.edu/topics/tcltk/index.html a very good tutorial covering the basics of TCL. The tutorial itself begins at http://hegel.ittc.ukans.edu/topics/tcltk/tutorial-plugin/index.html
http://www.pconline.com/~erc/tcl.htm Graphical applications with TCL/TK includes some great examples of laying out large apps.
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course an old web site with a variety of pages covering various Tcl topics.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2003/12/16/begin_programming.html Michael Norton's Elementary Computer Graphics article is a Tcl tutorial
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/l-dw-linuxtcl-i.html?S_TACT=103AMW03&S_CMP=EDU IBM beginners Tcl/Tk quick start web-based tutorial. This introduction is not fully up-to-date, and has enough questions and errors that one might hesitate to point newbies to it. This tutorial has proven to be less then ideal (written by a non-Tcl type), so this one should be last on your list of sites to learn about Tcl.

Tk Tutorials

Title/Link Description Note
Tcl/Tk tutorial By Jan Bodnar. Concise, clear, easy to read
http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/index.html An excellent tutorial on Tk & ttk best practices by Mark Roeseman. Covers Perl, Ruby and (soon) Python language bindings to Tk, as well as Tcl.
http://www.icanprogram.com/09tk/main.html icanprogram website
http://www.cwflynt.com/CS146GameLab/ Clyf Flynt's Tcl Tutorial
http://www.ardenstone.com/projects/seniorsem/tcl/ A Non-Programmer's Introduction to Tcl/Tk Stuck with pre-2005 practices, but the basics have changed little since then.
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~saul/personal/archives/Tcl-Tk_stuff/tcl_examples/ Some examples of TK widgets.

Tcl Web/CGI/HTML Tutorials

  • BOOK Tcl for Web Nerds is an online book/tutorial. CL advises regarding updates of this resource: "Not recently. FAR from recently. And its culture is quite different from what most Web beginners in 2008 expect. It's the best suggestion I know, though."

Other languages

Specialized/Advanced

Title/Link Description Note
http://psg.com/~joem/tcl/CmdWrite.html An HTML version of the TclCommandWriting man page that comes with TclX. Explains the C API to Tcl, providing an introduction/tutorial on writing Tcl extensions.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/tcl/option-tutorial.html A tutorial on the option database
http://captaincrumb.browseireland.com/docs/computing/tcl/tk/canvas/ Captain Crumb explains canvases, with a focus on animation.
http://www.markroseman.com/tcl/mktcl.pdf tutorial on Metakit by Mark Roseman

Other related pages on this wiki

Dead References

The following references currently seem to no-longer be accessible. Rather than delete them, they are listed here as an aid to discovering lost content. Before moving references ot this section, try to confirm that the resource is really gone, and not just temporarily unavailable. Also, it may be possible to link to an archived version of the original content, perhaps at http://www.archive.org .

Title/Link Description Note
Source code: [L2 ] The X Resource, Issue 11 (July 1994), pp 205-248: A tutorial Introduction to Tcl and Tk, by Graham A. Mark [L3 ]
http://www.cs.tamu.edu/people/mmiller/tcl/ Tcl 8.0 tutorial by Michael S. Miller, based on the John Ousterhout tutorial, as well as Tcl UDP and a disk usage application. The creator also has some online doc for Tcl UPD and Tcl channels at http://www.cs.tamu.edu/people/mmiller/tcl/channel.html
http://www.swen.uwaterloo.ca/~dasiewic/courses/ece452/local/old_tuts/trudeau-tck-intro.pdf