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.

   * Unix
   1. C compiler (and [CriTcl]?) - needed to build non-script extensions
   1. 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)
   1. Some sort of text editor (See [Tcl Editors))
   1. [Tcl] - the place to learn hello, world 
   1. [TkTutor] - a good tutorial for intro to Tcl
   1. [Tk] - the place to learn it graphically
   1. [Tkcon] - a recommended user interface
   1. [Tcllib] - a good collection of useful Tcl code
   1. [Tclapps] - some example tcl scripts - the most important of which is tkchat!
   1. [TclX] - a lot of useful Unix-like extras
   1. [Expect] - very useful to automate command line apps, also some nice debugging tools
   1. [Img] - very useful to display various image types
   1. [Snack] - sound generation
   1. Some sort of database [Oratcl], etc.
   1. [TclPro] for visual debugger, static checker, binary wrapper
   1. [Frink] is another static checker
   1. [tclvfs] is in my opinion going to be a must have extension, for doing useful new things simply
   1. Thread is an extension to make simple threads available to the Tcl programmer
   1. [Tcldom]/[Tclxml],and the rest of the family if you are going to be doing xml work.
   1. [incr Tcl] or one of the other object oriented extensions if you are going to be writing code of much complexity or size
   1. [BLT], [Tix], or one of the other megawidget/addon widget extensions
   1. 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], ...]]


   * MacOSD (what is MacOSD?)
   1. C compiler
   1. GNU autoconf (???)
   1. Some sort of text editor
   1. [Tcl] - the place to learn hello, world 
   1. [TkTutor] - a good tutorial for intro to Tcl
   1. [Tk] - the place to learn it graphically
   1. [Tkcon] - a good interface
   1. [Tcllib] - a good collection of useful Tcl code
   1. QuickTimeTcl - interface to QuickTime

   * Windows

"[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)''