The Tcl language and Tk graphical toolkit are simple and powerful building blocks for custom applications. The Tcl/Tk combination is increasingly popular because it lets you produce sophisticated graphical interfaces with a few easy commands, develop and change scripts quickly, and conveniently tie together existing utilities or programming libraries.
One of the attractive features of Tcl/Tk is the wide variety of commands, many offering a wealth of options. Most of the things you'd like to do have been anticipated by the language's creator, John Ousterhout, or one of the developers of Tcl/Tk's many powerful extensions. Thus, you'll find that a command or option probably exists to provide just what you need.
And that's why it's valuable to have a quick reference that briefly describes every command and option in the core Tcl/Tk distribution as well as the most popular extensions. Keep this book on your desk as you write scripts, and you'll be able to find almost instantly the particular option you need.
Most chapters consist of alphabetical listings. Since Tk and mega-widget packages break down commands by widget, the chapters on these topics are organized by widget along with a section of core commands where appropriate. Contents include:
- Core Tcl and Tk commands and Tk widgets
- C interface (prototypes)
- Expect
- [incr Tcl] and [incr Tk]
- Tix
- TclX
- BLT
- Oratcl, SybTcl, and Tclodbc
Paul Raines is a physicist and scientific programmer at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University where he is part of a large collaboration studying CP violation (why charge and parity are not conserved in some particle decays). He is a huge advocate of scripting languages and has been using Tcl on various projects since 1992. He is also the coauthor of O'Reilly & Associates' Tcl/Tk in a Nutshell. When he can get away from the lab, Paul enjoys hiking, bridge, and soccer.
When Jeff Tranter was first exposed to UNIX-based workstations about ten years ago, he dreamed of being able to afford a system with similar capabilities for home use. Today, he sees Linux as the realization of that dream, with the added bonus of being able to examine and modify all of the source code and even contribute to its development. He's been using Linux since 1992 and is the author of the freely available Linux Sound and CD-ROM HOWTO guides. Jeff has also written a number of Linux utilities and several Linux related magazine articles. Jeff received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Western Ontario. He currently works as a software designer for a high-tech telecommunications company in Kanata, Ontario, Canada's Silicon Valley North.
