Re: [MACTCL] Question on Tcl-Tk, Perl/Tk, Tcl-TkAqua, and X

[Daniel A. S. <st...@ic...>]

Carl,

On Tuesday, Apr 29, 2003, at 21:13 Australia/Sydney, Carl Baltrunas 
wrote:

> That is precisely what I am doing... asking the experts first...  I'l 
> try the newsgroup next... thanks.
> 	Thank you for a quick response.  I believe you are one of the 
> experts, at least for the TclTkAquaBI releases.

sure, it's just that I don't know anything much about PerlTk ...

> 	I have installed perl 5.8.0 and PerlTk804.024 already and went 
> through the examples and
> 	reviewed much of the Book "Mastering Perl/Tk", however using XDarwin 
> on a laptop which
> 	only has a 1-button track-pad, so I am not sure if XDarwin windows 
> are very usable without
> 	a 3-button or 2-button interface.  I've also installed your 
> TclTkAquaBI-8.4.2.0 and was doing
> 	an initial comparison when I thought to write to the mailing list 
> before I invest too much time
> 	on one track or another.
>
> 	I will also look to see if the porters of the PerlTk distribution for 
> OS X are going that direction
> 	once I identify who they are.  Apparently they do have a package 
> install which was much
> 	better than having to build it myself from source.  (Still getting 
> used to doing that on OS X).

please let the tcl-mac list know if you learn anything, so that we can 
pass it on when this question arises again in the future...

> I will keep an ear out for messages on the tcl-mac mailing list, but 
> may not upgrade with each revision
> 	at least until I feel comfortable making the updates.  I see an 
> ANNouncement today from you
> 	about some updates, so I will have to look at that in the next week 
> or so.

these were really more for specific sub-packages, if you don't use them 
you probably don't need the updates.

>> In general, IMHO tcl is much easier to learn than Perl and has great 
>> online resources in the wiki
>> 	http://wiki.tcl.tk
>> and
>> 	news:comp.lang.tcl
>> so it may be easier than you imagine to get something off the ground 
>> using just Tcl/Tk...
>
> I will check these out.  Any recommendations on documentation?  Is the 
> online information enough to
> get going or should I get one of the O'Reilly books on Tcl before 
> diving in to learning Tcl-Tk?

I have learnt most of what I know about tcl/tk from the manpages which 
are really quite good; if you want a book, Welch is very good, and a 
new edition is on the way (c.f. comp.lang.tcl where this was discussed 
recently)
	http://www.beedub.com/book/
See the wiki for other book ideas:
	http://mini.net/tcl/book

Cheers,

Daniel

--
** Daniel A. Steffen     **  "And now for something completely
** Dept. of Mathematics  **   different"    Monty Python
** Macquarie University  **  <mailto:st...@ma...>
** NSW 2109 Australia    **  <http://www.maths.mq.edu.au/~steffen/>