Name: Tcl and the Tk toolkit
ISBN: 9780321336330

Tcl and the Tk toolkit

The Tcl scripting language and the Tk toolkit, a programming environment for creating graphical user interfaces under X Windows together represent one of the most exciting innovations in X Window System programming. Because Tcl and Tk are so easy to learn, extremely powerful, and contain sophisticated features, they have dramatically reduced development time for thousands of X programmers. Written by the creator of Tcl and Tk, this book is the single authoritative resource for anyone who wants to work with this extraordinary environment. The book offers an introduction and overview of Tcl and Tk and then presents detailed instructions for script writing in Tcl and working with the Tk toolkit. You will discover how Tk's windowing shell, wish, enables you to develop window-based applications with amazingly few lines of code. You will also find information on Tk's novel and powerful facility for linking applications. Many other features are also described, such as Tk's hypertext and hypergraphics widgets and Tcl's facilities for procedures, list management, and subprocess execution. For interested readers, the book also describes the C interfaces for Tcl and Tk, showing how to extend their built-in features by writing new C commands. Upon reading this book, you will learn how to produce far more powerful X Windows System applications in a fraction of the time that used to be required.

What Hacker News says

wduquetteApr 2025

Heh. The books on the list would be the ones from which I learned new ways to think about programming. Most of them are now long out-of-date, as witness the discussion on "101 BASIC Games" going on elsewhere on Hacker News.

"101 Basic Games", edited by David Ahl and published by DEC. I learned to program by typing in the code from this book back in the late '70's.

"Write Your Own Programming Language Using C++", by Norman E. Smith. This is about writing a simple Forth interpreter. I used what I learned to write a simple Forth interpreter in C, which I then used as an embedded extension language in a couple of apps I was working on at the time. This was on a VAX, and rather before I'd ever heard of anything like TCL/TK.

"Tcl and the Tk Toolkit", by John Ousterhout, which (among other things) explained how an embedded extension language ought to work.

The O'Reilly X Windows books, and various O'Reilly books with animals on the cover. They were essential references, back in the day.

"The C++ FAQs", by I don't remember who. I never used C++ much; but this book was an excellent introduction to all of the pitfalls in the C++ of the day, and how to use C++ without shooting yourself in the foot--and an even better example of how to write for programmers. It was a big influence on how I later wrote programmer's documentation.

"Refactoring", by Martin Fowler. I've never followed the advice in this book slavishly, but it's tremendously affirming to read a new book encouraging you to do what you were doing already without having a name for it.

"Effective Java", by Joshua Bloch, which I spent a lot of time with about ten years ago; it helped me come to grips with Java and avoid a variety of foot-guns, much like "The C++ FAQs".

Various Lisp books; I don't like Lisp all that much, or Scheme either; but I come back to one or the other every few years and take another look, because I always learn something.

Various other texts on specific programming languages, as I experiment with them; "Learn You a Haskell for a Great Good" sticks out mostly because it has a memorable title.

And "Crafting Interpreters", which I've worked all the way through and then run with. Last month I implemented a simple Datalog implementation in a few days using the techniques from CI; I'll soon be integrating it into a much enhanced version of Nystrom's Lox.

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ofalkaedOct 2024

John Ousterhout's Tcl and the Tk Toolkit is great and has been updated to Tcl/Tk 8.5 which is recent enough to not cause headaches. Don't think it goes into self contained executable but covers everything else very well.

Edit: Just remembered that Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide by Flynt has a chapter on self contained executables and the various tools for making them. Have not looked into this book much so can't comment on it.

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adunsmoorJul 2015

Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by J. Osterhout is an old reference but very useful for getting started with the C API to Tcl including embedding an interpreter. The last 1/3rd of the book is on writing Tcl applications in C.

Also look at the the source files for the Tcl (tclsh) or Tk (wish) shells. They are fairly concise.

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bchJul 2015

That book is such a masterpiece of technical writing I've recommended it to people who don't even own VWs. It deserves to be recognized in the same discussions as The C Programming Language, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, and the 1st ed. of Tcl and the Tk Toolkit.

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bchOct 2011

Hey @davidw.

We can hope that they might receive similar treatment as John Ousterhout's "Tcl and the Tk Toolkit" did. JOs work (including TatTT) is often held up as excellent writing as well. The second ed. of that book was updated by a group of experts w/ JOs blessing, but w/o his participation if I understand correctly. Indeed @davidw was a contributor to that project ;) (thx. david.)

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pdwJan 2022

How does that book compare to the third edition of Ousterhout's _Tcl and the Tk Toolkit_? (other than that Ousterhout also covers Tk, obviously)

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