Learning Perl/TK

Learning Perl/TK

by Nancy Walsh
3/5
(27 votes)

Learning Perl/Tk is a tutorial for Perl/Tk, the extension to Perl for creating graphical user interfaces.

With Tk, Perl programs can be window-based rather than command-line based, with buttons, entry fields, listboxes, menus, and scrollbars.

Originally developed for the Tcl language, the Perl port of the Tk toolkit liberates Perl programmers from the world of command-line options, STDIN, and STDOUT, allowing them to build graphical, event-driven applications for both Windows and UNIX.

This book is aimed at Perl novices and experts alike.

It explains the reasoning behind event-driven applications and drills in guidelines on how to best design graphical applications.

It teaches how to implement and configure each of the Perl/Tk graphical elements step-by-step.

Special attention is given to the geometry managers, which are needed to position each button, menu, label and listbox in the window frame.

Although this book does not teach basic Perl, anyone who has written even the simplest Perl program should be able to learn Tk from this book.

The writing is breezy and informal, and gets right to the point of what you need to know and why.

The book is rife with illustrations that demonstrate how each element is drawn and how its configuration options affect its presentation.

Learning Perl/Tk is for every Perl programmer who would like to implement simple, easy-to-use graphical interfaces.

First published
1999
Publishers
O'Reilly Media· Incorporated
Subjects
Perl tk toolkit

Although I don't program in Perl, I bought this book because it was recommended as a reference for using TK with the Ruby language, since there is no good documentation for Ruby/TK. I found the book very easy to use, and was able to make some fairly complex GUI's pretty quickly.

This is a solid tutorial that goes through the most important components in Tk and contains good illustrations. You won't become an expert (see that word "Learning" in the title?

I used this book to learn the basics of Tk with Perl under Windows, and found it a fine, concise and clear reference. It got me quickly to the point of being able to develop useful graphical applications and gave what I felt to be a good grounding in important concepts and points.

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