Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

In the chapter on the Text widget, there was a snippet to redirect ordinary print (or printf)

to the Text widget.

tie *STDOUT, ref $text, text;

which throws up an error. ->

Failed to AUTOLOAD 'Tk::Frame::TIEHANDLE' at ircsnoop.pl line 16

I notice that the version used in Browse Contents here is different, but still does not explain how to handle it

Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

It might just my background or my personal, but coming from much UNIX scripting and VB/Access experience I found this book frustrating and slow. Being brand new to Perl TK just about every thing I wanted to do was an ordeal finding it, if it was explained at all.

Try looking up centering text in an HList widget, changing fonts or putting pictures on buttons.....locating windows within windows, embedding objects, pulling data from files and displaying. How about explaining the difference between Listboxes and Hlists? That was a time killer. I found myself endlessly going to forums or counting on coworkers for simple stuff which is embarassing on the job. On top of this, the index is merciless and screwed up. Perhaps it is a great reference book for the Perl Tk guru.

It must not be Nancy Walsh, because later I found "Learning Perl Tk", an earlier book which was wayyyy better- much easier to find things and program quickly. I rarely rate books bad, but I give this one an "F".....where's my Bic lighter?

Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

Although this book is a great book for learning TK, it is not all that good for reference. The Index in this book is so full of errors that the index is next to unusable for a quick lookup. That aside, this book is chuck full of valuable information for those new to Perl/TK and for those who are not so new to it.

The only thing that would have been nice is an appendix in the back that shows all the methods each widget has.

Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

This is a good book no doubt.. Infact a lot improvement from the book Learning Perl Tk... Well I had to read this book asking it from My friend who was here for a short time.. as this book is very difficult to get in India. After reading this book, I tried to get it in shops in Bangalore, but it's not availaible...

Well It's a nice book overall.. The good thing is that one who does not has the book learning perl Tk.. does not need to worry, as nearly everything essential from that is covered in this, ofcourse in addition to that a lot of exciting stuff too regarding Perl Tk...

Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

In my opinion, this is the most complete reference on Perl/Tk. Well written. I especially appreciate the way the authors covered geometry management.

My one complaint, however, is the lack of availability of the example code in the book. Some selected examples can be downloaded from the O'Reilly website but the larger, more involved examples are not available. I have typed a couple code examples from the book and they wouldn't run.

Why bother publishing only some of the code examples? I would hope that, after paying $45 for the book, O'Reilly doesn't expect me to pay another $20 to gain access to the example code on line. This would be enough to keep me from buying another O'Reilly book.

This one beef aside, I would recommend this book.

Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

This is a great book. It finally puts in one place all of the elements

of Perl/Tk.

It is full of good examples and I have found it very enlightening even

though I have been using Perl/Tk to build very intense applications

for 4 years.

The only thing that jumped out at me was that there was no reference

to the Table widget. Did it fall on the editing room floor?

The explantion of the geometry managers seemed to be expanded from

Learning Perl/Tk which is very helpful as this is one of the most

difficult concepts to grasp for complex UI development.

Revisiting the Towers of Hanoi problem with a Perl/Tk visualization

was a real kick!

Books like this help expose just what a useful package Perl/Tk is and

should be recommended reading for everyone!!

Comments about oreilly Mastering Perl/Tk:

Mastering Perl/Tk is a very good book; meaning that it's a tiny bit of a disappointment as a part of "The Menagerie". The first part of the book seems to be a rehash of Learning Perl/Tk, and the rest of the material is somewhat haphazardly organized--it's all there but can sometimes be difficult to find.

Having said that, this book is a vast improvement over the TK::* perldocs, and contains numerous useful (and reasonably well explained) examples, tips and techniques.

The book also contains some real nuggets--not always directly related to Tk; the example app for downloading comic strips has a wonderful digression on creating non-blocking network processes in a Microsoft Windows environment.

The reference material is very useful, and more up to date than the "Pocket Reference" (but at 746+ pages, you won't be slipping this book into the back pocket of your jeans.)

All in all, Mastering Perl/Tk is a good buy if you need or want to learn and use Perl/Tk. Read it cover-to-cover, then be prepared to flip through the index.