3. Getting More InformationGeneral Tcl/Tk programming and
introduction: See Brent Welch's unbelievable book
Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk. Due to
Brent's generosity, you can even read and print the older
editions and selected chapters from the current editions at
http://www.beedub.com/book
. Downloads needed to develop in Tcl: See
http://www.tcl.tk for TclPro
1.4.1 for all operating systems, plus almost any add-on package you
could ever want. TclPro contains the 2 interpreters (Tclsh and
Wish) version 8.3, plus an excellent interactive debugger and a
suite of helpful tools and libraries. Version 1.4.1 was released to
the public. However, as of mid-2002, it looks like
ActiveState is
taking over the TclPro product as a commercial product. Remember
you can always get the 'standard' interpreters for all
operating systems from
http://tcl.sourceforge.net
because Tcl is open source software. Editors with syntax highlighting, etc:
For MS Windows, I like the inexpensive commercial product TextPad
at
http://www.textpad.com.
Currently the cost is $27 US per license, and you can try before
you buy. Be sure to get the Tcl syntax definition file from their
web site. TextPad is the most feature-rich editor for MS Windows
I've ever seen, and has the ability to emulate Microsoft
editors' behavior. You can use it as an IDE for Tcl/Tk
development by interfacing it with the interpreters and your other
tools. For Unix/Linux, and maybe even for MS Windows, try Nedit at
http://www.nedit.org.
It's free under the GNU General Public License. It also does a
good job of making MS Windows users productive right away. Tools you'll probably want: The
first thing most VB programmers want is to hit an ODBC database. Go
get the TclODBC 2.2 package from
http://www.tcl.tk . It's
a DLL for Win32 that hooks you into all ODBC data sources and
drivers. It comes with documentation, and there's a minimal
example above. Note that it may or may not be portable to other
operating systems, so you might want to wrap all your calls to it
into procedures. That way you can port your code to use other
libraries later. Regular expressions are almost a powerful
programming language of their own. Accordingly, they take some time
to master. The simple Tcl program 'Visual RegExp' has
helped me tremendously with that. Get it at
http://laurent.riesterer.free.fr/regexp
. There are also several packages available for hooking Tcl to the
world of ActiveX, so you can automate MS Office applications,
etc.. Essential help topics: Once you have
TclPro and its help file, go to its index and visit the
'Tcl' topic. There's a concise summary of the
language's syntax rules, and the substitutions that drive it.
Also be sure to hit the 're_syntax', 'tclvars',
'tclsh', and 'wish' topics. These are apparently
translated from the Tcl man pages on Unix/Linux, and are some of
the best texts I've ever seen for WinHelp, if you need
reference material. I don't recommend
reading this help file as your first introduction, but it is an
excellent reference while programming. 'Start' menu items: Once you
have TclPro installed, you should look at the 'Start' menu
for TclPro, and check out the 'Incr Widgets Reference' and
'Widget Tour'. These show the built-in GUI capabilities of
Tk with the actual Tcl code required to use
them. Advocacy (how to convince your management to use
Tcl/Tk): A wealth of advocacy information is available
at http://www.tcl.tk
.
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