Exploring Expect

How To Read This Book

This book can be read from front to back. Each chapter flows naturally into the next, and examples in each chapter only use the concepts that have been introduced up to that point. Of course, you can skip chapters or jump around if you like. But I recommend you come back and read everything eventually. This book is chock-full of examples—and they are really worth seeing. To further stimulate you, exercises at the end of each chapter hint at additional thoughts and applications.

Expect draws together a lot of concepts from different programs and even different operating systems. For this reason it is likely that you are familiar with some pieces but not others. The book is laid out so that it is easy to skip things with which you are already familiar. The Preface provides mostly historical notes, setting the scene for Expect and describing how it came into existence. This is not critical to the use of Expect but it makes interesting reading. You may want to read it later.

Chapter 1 is an overview of Expect, giving a taste of what it can do, why it is worth your attention, who uses it, and how it fits into the world. If you know little or nothing about Expect and would like to quickly know what it is all about, read this chapter rather than flipping through the book.

Chapter 2 is an overview of Tcl, the language that Expect uses. Tcl is used by many other software packages so you may already know it—I encourage you to read Chapter 2 anyway. Even if you know Tcl ...