Mastering Perl Tk

Covers basic and advanced applications of Perl/Tk, discussing topics including basic Perl/Tk widgets and geometry managers, how to use callbacks and bindings effectively, working with images, and developing a Tk widget in C.

This tutorial for Perl/Tk, the extension to Perl for creating graphical user interfaces, shows readers how to use Perl/Tk to build graphical, event-driven applications for both Windows and UNIX. Rife with illustrations, it teaches how to implement and configure each Perl/Tk graphical element.

Perl/Tk is the marriage of the Tk graphical toolkit with Perl, the powerful programming language used primarily for system administration, web programming, and database manipulation. With Perl/Tk, you can build Perl programs with an attractive, intuitive GUI interface with all the power of Perl behind it.Mastering Perl/Tk is the "bible" of Perl/Tk: It's not only a great book for getting started, but the best reference for learning the techniques of experienced Perl/Tk programmers. The first half of the book contains the basics on how to use Perl/Tk, and then branches out into advanced applications with a series of extensive program examples. The result is a book accessible for novices, and invaluable for experienced programmers ready to learn the next step in the elegant and effective use of Perl/Tk. The book includes: An introduction to each of the basic Perl/Tk widgets and geometry managers A dissection of the MainLoop, including how to use callbacks and bindings effectively Coverage of the Tix widgets, an extended set of widgets that are a part of the standard Perl/Tk distribution Working with images in Perl/Tk, including bitmaps, pixmaps, photos, and how to compose a compound image type How to create custom mega-widgets in Perl/Tk, both composite and derived Handling interprocess communication with Perl/Tk, both with standard Unix utilities (pipes and sockets) and with the send command designed for direct communication between Tk applications Developing your own Tk widget in the C language Examples of web applications written with Perl/Tk and the LWP library The book also includes appendices on installing Perl/Tk, a complete quick-reference for each standard widget, and listings of all the extended examples in the book.Nancy Walsh is the author of Learning Perl/Tk, and Steve Lidie wrote the Perl/Tk Pocket Reference as well as a series of Perl/Tk articles in The Perl Journal. Together, they have written Mastering Perl/Tk to be the definitive guide to Perl/Tk.

This small reference is a guide to almost all Perl/Tk graphical elements, including general widget information and the details of each widget, window management, events, bindings, fonts, images, and geometry management.

Covers advanced features of Perl, how the Perl interpreter works, and presents areas of modern computing technology such as networking, user interfaces, persistence, and code generation.

Take the next step toward Perl mastery with advanced concepts that make coding easier, maintenance simpler, and execution faster. Mastering Perl isn't a collection of clever tricks, but a way of thinking about Perl programming for solving debugging, configuration, and many other real-world problems you’ll encounter as a working programmer. The third in O’Reilly’s series of landmark Perl tutorials (after Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), this fully upated edition pulls everything together and helps you bend Perl to your will. Explore advanced regular expressions features Avoid common problems when writing secure programs Profile and benchmark Perl programs to see where they need work Wrangle Perl code to make it more presentable and readable Understand how Perl keeps track of package variables Define subroutines on the fly Jury-rig modules to fix code without editing the original source Use bit operations and bit vectors to store large data efficiently Learn how to detect errors that Perl doesn’t report Dive into logging, data persistence, and the magic of tied variables

Many programmers would love to use Perl for projects that involve heavy lifting, but miss the many traditional algorithms that textbooks teach for other languages. Computer scientists have identified many techniques that a wide range of programs need, such as: Fuzzy pattern matching for text (identify misspellings!)Finding correlations in dataGame-playing algorithmsPredicting phenomena such as Web trafficPolynomial and spline fitting Using algorithms explained in this book, you too can carry out traditional programming tasks.