Reviews for Mastering Perl/Tk

1. An essential guide to developing GUIs with Perl.

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2002

   Even sitting on the bookshelf, `Mastering Perl/Tk' looks a bit daunting - in terms of page count it's not far short of the Camel book itself - but it's rather different in terms of content. `Mastering Perl/Tk' is a ground-up guide to developing GUIs in Perl without having to resort to the horrors of Windows/X11 programming in C.

   As you might expect, Perl/Tk is a set of Perl bindings for Tcl/Tk and the Tk.pm module provides a whole host of widgets which you won't find in a standard Tcl/Tk distribution, and the book covers them all in detail. Better still, from my point of view, prior knowledge of Tcl/Tk isn't a prerequisite although a basic grasp of the techniques is useful. Prior knowledge of Perl *is* essential, and this book is aimed squarely at intermediate to advanced programmers.

   My current job requires me, amongst other things, to write GUIs for existing code, and I switched to Perl/Tk mainly to avoid having to hack on rather old and crusty Tcl code. Reading the book cover-to-cover isn't necessary and any competent Perl programmer will be able to get results fairly quickly just by looking up the bits s/he needs - I had a basic but functional GUI up and going inside a working day, for example, and a bit of extra hacking with the book as a reference guide had the whole thing looking rather more professional shortly after.

   One of O'Reilly's better efforts, up there with the Camel Book and the Cookbook, and worthy of a place on any Perl programmer's bookshelf.

2. Good, but the field is narrow.

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2002

   This is a good book, but there are not many other alternative titles to choose from. GUI building is perl seems to be an area that has been ignored in part and this may help the change things.