Exploring Expect

Expect And Tcl Resources

This book contains a great deal of information about Expect and Tcl. Yet there are other resources that you may find useful. I will occasionally refer to some of these resources. The others are just for extra reading on your own.

Important Reading Material

The software for Expect, Tcl, and related packages include online manuals often called man pages. This is the definitive reference material. I will occasionally use the phrase Tcl reference material, for example, to refer to the Tcl man pages. As with most references, the reference material does not provide a lot of background or examples. Nevertheless, it is the most crucial documentation and therefore comes with the software itself.

I encourage you to use TkMan for reading man pages. Written by Tom Phelps at the University of California at Berkeley, TkMan provides an extremely pleasant GUI for browsing man pages. I cannot describe all the nice features of TkMan in this small space. Instead I will merely say that I now actually look forward to reading man pages as long as I can do it with TkMan. TkMan is written in Tcl and Tk and offers a splendid example of their power. Instructions on how to obtain TkMan can be found in the Tcl FAQ (see page 19).

Authoritatively written by the author of Tcl and Tk, John Ousterhout’s Tcl and the Tk Toolkit (Addison-Wesley, 1994) is really four books in one, all written in a very readable and balanced style. Two of the books introduce Tcl and Tk. The other two describe how ...