8. References

For many reasons people often like having a hard-copy manual as a reference or like to be helped by other folks online.

Here you can find a selection of reference books, tutorials, www-sites and newsgroup.

8.1 Books

Many books concerning Tcl/Tk were written and are to be published. I won't even try to list them all (another howto woudn't be enough for that : ) ). You can find much more information plus additional notes at:

• www.tcltk.com/consortium/resources/books.html
• www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/categories/computer-programming/tcl-tk-article/002-8989352-4516417
• Page: tcl_books.html at URL starbase-neosoft-tcl-books

Here I will try to summarize with some notes the book I know concerning the subject, they're all at a basic-medium level. Again, people who know the subject, have enough information about where to find advanced level books.

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit

Author: John K. Ousterhout

WWW book information: cseng.aw.com/bookdetail.qry?ISBN=0%2D201%2D63337%2DX&ptype=0

Book's examples: ftp.script ics.com/pub/tcl/doc/book.examples.Z

Book suppliment: www.scriptics.com/doc/tk 4.0.ps

The book primarily covers Tcl 7.3 and Tk 3.6.

Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, II ed.

Author: Brent Welch

WWW book information: www.beedub.com/book/

Book's table of contents: www.beedub.com/book/

Book promotion info at section_50000.html of the URL www.borders.com/sections/

This updated edition describes Tcl / Tk 8.0 as it was during the beta period. Along with the material from the first edition, it also covers sockets, packag es, namespaces, a great section describing the changes in Tcl 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, and 8.0 (and Tk as well), Safe Tk and the Plugin!

Tcl and Tk Reference Manual

Editors: Donald Barnes, Marc Ewing, Erik Troan

WWW book information: www.lsl.com/catalog/bo oks/tcltk/

The Visual TCL Handbook, 1/e

Author: David Young

WWW book information: www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=013461674X/u/7141-5908756-107481

A comprehensive guide to Visual TCL. This book leads reader from basic graphical user interface development concepts to meaningful application develo pment. The book focuses on the TCLX and VT extensions, addressing many fundamental TCL topics. VT is a Motif based graphical interface, incompatible with Tk. The entire TCL language is documented in a separate Commands section. Comes with a CD-ROM that includes SGI, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and Unixware versions of Visual Tcl.

Running LINUX

Author: Matt Welsh and Lar Kaufman

WWW book information: www.ora.com/ca talog/runux2/noframes.html

Running Linux is a really well written basic book. It has a chapter on programming using Tcl/Tk. (and Perl, C, C++).

Tcl/Tk for Dummies (For Dummies)

Author: Timothy Webster, with Alex Francis

WWW book information: www.dummies.com/

Another one of the series of the paperback programming books. This one focuses on the Tcl plugin as a programming environment.

Interactive Web Applications With Tcl/Tk

Authors: Michael Doyle Hattie Schroeder

WWW book information: www.eolas.com/tcl/

This is a learning by example book, for people who know a bit of programming, but are not experts. It covers developing applets as well as stand-alone appli cations and simple server applications. The book comes with the Spynergy toolkit, whic h adds a variety of pure Tcl/Tk procedures for distributed processing, URL retri eval, HTML rendering, database management and platform independent file managment, Ed, a Tcl editor and testing environment, an image conversion tool, a demo of Tk features, a client/server version of a rolodex application, a pure Tcl web server, a client/server push application, a tcl web browser,

8.2 Manual and On-line Tutorials

• John Ousterhout has written an engineering style guide that describes the coding, documentation, and testing conventions that will be used at Sun in the coding of the C code in the Tcl core and has made it available to other Tcl and Tk developers. It is located at ftp.script ics.com/pub/tcl/doc/engManual.tar.Z
• A second style guide, covering the writing of Tcl scripts, can be found at ftp.scr iptics.com/pub/tcl/docs/styleGuide.tar.gz. Other versions of it can be found at sunscript.su n.com/techcorner/styleGuide.ps.
• A brief introduction to TCL/TK by David Martland
• Another tutorial untitled User interfaces with Tcl/T kwas written by Fintan Culwin .
• Although you should have your Tcl/Tk manual pages on your system, here's another place where to look for TCL Manual Pa ges (from TCL7.4)-Tk Manual Pages (from TK4.0).
• The Tcl/Tk Cookbook offe rs a lot of getting-started information.

8.3 World Wide Web sites

There are a great number of WWW resources which provide additional information about many aspects of Tcl and its extensions.

• Refer to Tcl-FAQs (pa rt2) for a great number of pointers to Tcl/Tk documentation and web sites.
• Point your web browser at Tcl/Tk Information : a site with many links to TclTk resources on the web (Information, Extensions, Tools, Training and Events).
• Have a look at Tcl-Consortium : a non-profit organization which promotes Tcl/Tk and supports the development community.
• Point your Web browser at The Official Contributed Sources A rchive for the Tool Command Language (Tcl) and the Tk Toolkit, hosted by NeoSoft, Inc.
• For a discussion dealing with the pros and cons of the major scripting languages : article in SunWorld by Cameron Laird
• A web page that contains a variety of comparisons between Tcl/Tk and othe r similar systems. Most of them are taken from "comp.lang.tcl", the author would be happy to add any other important article that you folks want to send to him.: Comparison by Wayne Christopher.
• E.J. Friedman-Hill's Tcl/Tk Course: this document is available only in PowerPoint source form and in low-quality HTML form (in HTML format all the figures and some of the text is missing).

8.4 Other documents & Frequently Asked Questions

A lot of material is available on the Internet: introductory papers, white papers, tutorials, slides, postscript versions of published books in draft and many more.

For a complete reference please give a look at the excellent Tcl-FAQs .

8.5 Newsgroup

comp.lang.tcl is an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup, created for the discussion of the Tcl programming language and tool s that use some form of Tcl, such as the Tk toolkit for the X window system, Extended Tcl, and expect.

For Tcl/Tk related announcements always refer to comp.lang.tcl.announce : you will find release announcement, patches, new application and so on.

Again, faq could be retrieved at Tcl-FAQs.