Learning Perl/Tk

By combining the rough-and-ready Perl language with the graphical user interface (GUI) capabilities of the Tk toolkit, Perl/Tk makes it easy to write event-based GUI applications quickly--once you know what you're doing. Learning Perl/Tk shows you how to build GUIs with everyone's favorite public-domain programming language. This book focuses only on GUIs--it leaves in-depth exploration of the Perl language to other books. (Learning Perl is the best of that genre.)

Assuming only a basic familiarity with Perl, Learning Perl/Tk shows you what you need to know to create graphical front ends for Perl programs. Author Nancy Walsh starts with a quick orientation, showing you how to set up Perl/Tk and giving you some simple examples of what GUI source code looks like. Then, she details the use and functions of geometry managers, which the Tk module uses to arrange interface elements. From there, she explores each widget individually, showing how to use buttons, checkbuttons, radiobuttons, labels, entries, and more. She also addresses event handlers. Her discussion of each widget is clear and liberally sprinkled with examples.

One appendix lists the default values of the Tk widgets in tabular form; another spotlights the differences among versions of Perl and Tk for various operating systems. A final appendix explores the font-management capabilities of Tk 8.0. This book doesn't come with a companion disk, and it would be nice to have the examples available locally. However, the publisher maintains a library of related files on its Web site. --David Wall