Rating: 
Summary: Tcl trick collection!
Review: (This review is for the 3rd edition of this book, and
I am only half way through the book.)
It is very hard to learn Tcl/Tk reading this book.
This book does not teach you THE language. It only
tries to teach you tricks and way arounds that could
be useful for someone already know Tck/Tk.
If the author have devoted a couple of early chapters
to explain the principles of the language, he wouldn't
have to write such a thick book full of only tricks.
Worse, the examples in the book are often not well
explained, and you have to jump around the chapters
to read the examples because most examples use commands
that are introduced in later chapters.
Rating:
Summary: Tcl trick collection!
Review: (This review is for the 3rd edition of this book, and
I am only half way through the book.)
It is very hard to learn Tcl/Tk reading this book.
This book does not teach you THE language. It only
tries to teach you tricks and way arounds that could
be useful for someone already know Tck/Tk.
If the author have devoted a couple of early chapters
to explain the principles of the language, he wouldn't
have to write such a thick book full of only tricks.
Worse, the examples in the book are often not well
explained, and you have to jump around the chapters
to read the examples because most examples use commands
that are introduced in later chapters.
Rating: 
Summary: very cool..how to book
Review: * excellent reference book. * very useful sample code. * integration with C programs pretty well documented. * easy to find sample code/section while searching.overall excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: May not suit Batch Programmers.
Review: ...The last thing that the world needs is another tutorial book on the Tcl programming language. So here's ours...
When we sat down to plan a class at MIT on Web service design and implementation, our first thought was to give the
students our favorite commercial Tcl book: Brent Welch's Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk. At 630 pages, nobody can
accuse Prentice-Hall of shortchanging the reader on information. Sadly, however, for the Web nerd most of this information is
useless. Two-thirds of the book is devoted to Tk, a toolkit for constructing graphical user interfaces. On the Internet, the user
interface is a Web browser. If you're programming a Web service, all you care about is using Tcl to produce some HTML that gets
sent to the client.
Another problem with using Welch's book for our class is that he is unable to assume that his readers are primarily interested
in building Web applications. So his examples have to be extremely generic.
A final and crushing problem with the book is that it isn't available on the Web. Even if our students can afford to pony up
... they probably can't afford the physical therapy and orthopedic surgery they'd require after
lugging it around from class to class.
What about Tcl for Web Nerds then? We hope that a professional programmer or MIT student can breeze through it in one
evening. By the end of the evening, that person should have learned Tcl, learned a little something about the Web, and not have
been bored.
It is available on the Web at a permanent URL. If you don't like it, the authors will happily refund your purchase price. :-)
Rating:
Summary: 2nd Editions was bad....I have no hope for this one.
Review: 2nd Edition sucked. B. Welsh is all over the place. examples were very bad. I would not touch anything this guy does.
Rating:
Summary: THE book for Tcl/Tk
Review: A comprehensive, systematic guide to practical usage of Tcl/Tkup to version 8.2. Since we have now 8.3 already one needs to checkthe site to see the latest improvements of Tcl. This book constantly helps me to do daily tasks in Tcl. It's a tutorial and a reference. Still I like to mention the book "Effective Tcl/Tk Programming" by Harison / McLennan, which goes much further in tutoring the GUI things. And there is also a handy refernece called "Tcl/Tk, Programmer's Reference" by C.Nelson which fits better onto the desk, if that's an issue. The very old book of Ousterhout himself, which was really great, is now completely outdated.
Rating:
Summary: This is the ONLY book to buy for TCL
Review: Brent B. Welch created a book which enables both a new reader and an old TCL programer all facts on TCL/TK... Great to learn to TCL and to use as a reference...
Rating: 
Summary: Keeping it updated
Review: Brent seems to keep his book up to date with this 3rd edition. John Ousterhout should have done the same with his, since he "invented" Tcl/Tk. But Brent is trying to fill that gap.
Rating: 
Summary: Not very good for learning Tcl, and not a good reference
Review: First, let me preface my review by saying that I am a professional C programmer, with a background in Perl and Sed/Awk, so I've been around the block a couple of times in terms of both structured programming languages and scripting languages. This is my first exposure to Tcl, and I must say I am rather disappointed. This book does a terrible job in introducing the language in a structured, straightforward and reasonable fashion. The sparse examples included are oftentimes not explained in the text, leaving the reader scratching their head trying to figure out why the syntax gives the results that it does. The index is very spotty, leaving out reference to pages where important topics are discussed at length. There is no overall command or syntax reference page, so you'e constantly flipping through the book trying to find where a particular command is defined. The CD included in the purchase price has got to be the most user-unfriendly collection of different versions of Tcl for different operating systems ever assembled. There's no installation program, so the reader is left trying to figure out what to put where on their computer. The "Getting Started" chapter in the text is supposed to guide you through this process, but because it has to deal with disparate systems and versions, is vague and generally unhelpful. Since Tcl is free anyway, and you're not likely to be using it without a computer that is connected to the Internet, why not just point the reader to the appropriate sites on the Web to download the latest versions of Tcl and Tk? I wish I could say something positive about this book, but I haven't really found it yet. I think that it might actually contain some good practical information for more advanced users of Tcl, but for the beginner this book is a joke.
Rating:
Summary: Book with great foundation
Review: First, the success of this book cannot be achieved without the community efforts for bringing Tcl 8.4 and beyond. Tcl continuous success is without a doubt due to the strong, talented community that has stayed focus and continued to help improve on a already great language. The book covers both Tcl, the language itself and Tk, the GUI toolkit. Tk success can be seen given that Perl, Python and Ruby have hooks to it. Topics which I enjoy a lot includes tclhttpd, tcl based web server and Startkits, a simple and effective way to package and distribute applications. On top of that it also covers, Metakit, an embeddable database engine which runs on dozens of platforms, including Unix, Windows, and Macintosh. As mention, Tcl success rest with its tight pool of talented contributors and the book (the authors) clearly translate the great stuffs that have been available into something that newcomers can easily picked up and grow with.
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