Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk Programming

Chapter 33. A Perl/Tk Roadmap

Jon Orwant

While editing TPJ, I often had trouble finding authors to write good beginner articles. I knew plenty of experts, but they usually preferred articles that displayed their expertise. Paradoxically, good articles on simple topics can be hard for experts to write, because it’s been a long time since they were beginners and they may not remember all of the pitfalls they encountered when they started out.

Steve Lidie, the author of most of the articles in this section, doesn’t have that problem: he’s written for both beginners and experts. As I write this, he just finished Mastering Perl/Tk for O’Reilly (co-authored with Nancy Walsh), which adapted five of his ten TPJ articles that were originally planned for this section. We didn’t feel right having similar Perl/Tk material appear in two of our books, so now you’ll have to settle for me.

I’m an intermediate Perl/Tk programmer. Every so often I need to create an interactive graphical application, which I always find I can slap together quickly with Perl/Tk. But I do it infrequently enough that I forget the names of all the widgets and functions, and the order of their parameters. This makes me an unimpressive Perl/Tk programmer, but it has a hidden silver lining—the lack of familiarity with the material allows me to help novices learning Perl/Tk for the first time.

The goal of this article is modest: I’m going to give a nearly code-free roadmap to the Perl/Tk universe, explain what I think is important ...