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Mastering Perl/Tk

by Steve Lidie and Nancy Walsh, ISBN 1-56592-716-8, First Edition, published January 2002

Perl is arguably the most popular scripting language in use today. It is used for a wide variety of tasks, including file processing, system administration, web programming, and database connectivity. Early Perl users had to be content with command-line interfaces or full-screen interfaces using Curses or similar systems, but the splitting-off of the Tk widget library from the Tcl language opened a whole new world to Perl. Perl programmers could now easily create graphical interfaces for their programs using Tk's flexible and friendly widget set and, with little effort, those programs could be made to work across Windows and Unix platforms.

The relatively recent advent of the web browser would seem to have made the Tk interface obsolete. CGI programs are almost inherently cross-platform and provide many of the same widgets as Tk (this includes Menus, Buttons, text entry fields, and so on). However, the inherent statelessness of the Web makes it difficult to write some programs for it. Perl/Tk provides a richer widget set than that available to the CGI programmer. Server push and client pull try to get around some of these limitations, while JavaScript fills in other gaps, but the fact is, the user experience still falls short in many instances. It is for precisely this reason that Perl/Tk continues to flourish.

The Tk module gives the Perl programmer full access to the powerful Tk widget set. This rich and diverse library, like Perl itself, makes the easy things easy and the hard things possible. Easy things include designing graphical interfaces with Buttons, Checkbuttons, Menus, and text entry fields—all of which you will learn about in the first half of this book. The second half of the book contains more advanced topics, such as creating custom widgets, interprocess communication, images, animation, and key bindings. The goal of this book is to take you from Tk neophyte to Tk expert.

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: Hello, Perl/Tk
Chapter 2: Geometry Management
Chapter 3: Fonts
Chapter 4: Button, Checkbutton, and Radiobutton Widgets
Chapter 5: Label and Entry Widgets
Chapter 6: The Scrollbar Widget
Chapter 7: The Listbox Widget
Chapter 8: The Text, TextUndo,and ROText Widgets
Chapter 9: The Canvas Widget
Chapter 10: The Scale Widget
Chapter 11: Frame, MainWindow,and Toplevel Widgets
Chapter 12: The Menu System
Chapter 13: Miscellaneous Perl/Tk Methods
Chapter 14: Creating Custom Widgets in Pure Perl/Tk
Chapter 15: Anatomy of the MainLoop
Chapter 16: User Customization
Chapter 17: Images and Animations
Chapter 18: A Tk Interface Extension Tour
Chapter 19: Interprocess Communicationwith Pipes and Sockets
Chapter 20: IPC with send
Chapter 21: C Widget Internals
Chapter 22: Perl/Tk and the Web
Chapter 23: Plethora of pTk Potpourri
Appendix A: Installing Perl/Tk
Appendix B: Options and Default Valuesfor Each Widget
Appendix C: Complete Program Listings
Index
Colophon

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