Mastering Perl/Tk: Graphical User Interfaces in Perl

Perl/Tk is the marriage of the Tk graphical toolkit with Perl, the powerful programming language used primarily for system administration, web programming, and database manipulation. With Perl/Tk, you can build Perl programs with an attractive, intuitive GUI interface with all the power of Perl behind it. Mastering Perl/Tk is the "bible" of Perl/Tk: It's not only a great book for getting started, but the best reference for learning the techniques of experienced Perl/Tk programmers. The first half of the book contains the basics on how to use Perl/Tk, and then branches out into advanced applications with a series of extensive program examples. The result is a book accessible for novices, and invaluable for experienced programmers ready to learn the next step in the elegant and effective use of Perl/Tk. The book includes:

• An introduction to each of the basic Perl/Tk widgets and geometry managers
• A dissection of the MainLoop, including how to use callbacks and bindings effectively
• Coverage of the Tix widgets, an extended set of widgets that are a part of the standard Perl/Tk distribution
• Working with images in Perl/Tk, including bitmaps, pixmaps, photos, and how to compose a compound image type
• How to create custom mega-widgets in Perl/Tk, both composite and derived
• Handling interprocess communication with Perl/Tk, both with standard Unix utilities (pipes and sockets) and with the send command designed for direct communication between Tk applications
• Developing your own Tk widget in the C language
• Examples of web applications written with Perl/Tk and the LWP library

The book also includes appendices on installing Perl/Tk, a complete quick-reference for each standard widget, and listings of all the extended examples in the book. Nancy Walsh is the author of Learning Perl/Tk, and Steve Lidie wrote the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference as well as a series of Perl/Tk articles in The Perl Journal. Together, they have written Mastering Perl/Tk to be the definitive guide to Perl/Tk.

Steve Lidie has spent decades consulting, programming and administering systems from Apple, CDC, DEC, HP, IBM, Microsoft and SGI. Author of the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference and graduate of Lehigh University, he currently manages the University's large-scale scientific computing complex, and occasionally writes Tk articles for The Perl Journal and PerlMonth.

Nancy Walsh has been involved with Perl (and Perl/Tk) since 1996. She received a Computer Science degree from the University of Arizona in 1993, and currently works as a Principal Consultant for XOR, Inc. doing J2EE and Java work on various projects. Nancy has taught several Perl/Tk Tutorials at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and is also the author of Learning Perl/Tk.