Updated 2009-08-27 11:16:22 by LV ▲

Purpose

Document various useful online or interactive Tcl and Tk tutorials..

The official Tcl tutorial is discussed at tcltutorial. Since this tutorial is free software under the same generous license as Tcl itself, you are welcome to help improve it, translate it, publish it, or do whatever else you would like.

Comments and suggestions on the contents from both new and experience users are very welcome.

SYStems How can we comment? I suggest a comment sections beneath each lesson. It will act like slashdot story comments, sometimes you can learn more from the comments than from the story. Actually this way the lesson itself can be very basic, and all the gotchas can appear in the users comments.

davidw You can comment just as you would with any other aspect of Tcl - via the tcl-core mailing list, or via the SF bug/request trackers. An on-line version with comments might be kind of neat, but I'm unlikely to spend time building that myself. I want something that can be shipped as-is with the core. So if there are things that need fixing/improving, let's do it.

LV Question: has anyone examined the tutorial to determine how much of the tcl scripting level language has been covered and how much remains to be covered?

NEM No. It's something I plan to do when I have more time, which should be after Christmas 2008.

LV another item of note - the above official tutorial is currently just for Tcl. If someone is looking for a useful contribution, writing similar tutorials for Tk, as well as other popular extensions, would be a wonderful thing to give back to the community.

Hopefully, you will be able to work with the others so that all the tutorials could end up in the same location, providing an evolving community electronic tcl book of sorts.

Take a look at Mark Roseman's http://www.tkdocs.com/ as a great set of documents. Perhaps this will inspire some writers into writing a gentle introduction to Tk.

Of course, just because there are plans to ship a tutorial with the Tcl core should not discourage anyone from writing their own tutorials. There are many ways to learn, and having many tutorials provides people with choices. As long as the information is correct, having choices is a good thing.

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English, General purpose

Tk Tutorials

Tcl Web/CGI/HTML Tutorials

  • BOOK Tcl for Web Nerds is an online book/tutorial. CL advises regarding updates of this resource: "Not recently. FAR from recently. And its culture is quite different from what most Web beginners in 2008 expect. It's the best suggestion I know, though."

Other languages

For non-programmers

  • Teach programming to children, of course.
  • "A Non-Programmer's Introduction to Tcl/Tk" [5] is stuck with pre-2005 practices--but the basics have changed little since then.
  • http://tcl.projectforum.com/young is a work in progress providing a tutorial for young people.
  • Alan Gauld's online tutorial "Learning to program" IS aimed at non-programmers. While the principle illustration language is Python, he also gives examples in Tcl (included with Python distributions) and Basic. See http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld/ for the tutorial.

Specialized/Advanced

Other related pages on this wiki

The point in providing one official tutorial is not to quash others efforts, but to provide a focal point for tutorial work in order to raise the bar some. It would be preferable to have one good freely available tutorial that is maintained rather than lots of stuff like the IBM one that apparently isn't that great. Other tutorials will then have to differentiate themselves in some way - more focus on beginners, on experts... they will have to adapt and improve.

There are also times when choice is not good. Tutorials for most people are something where they'd like to find one that's good, rather than 10 mediocre ones that all purport to teach the same material. Were it up to me I'd prune the above list to eliminate some of the older links that don't really have anything new or different, and then I would categorize the other tutorials.

- davidw

LV While certainly having one good tutorial is better than having 10 mediocre - having 10 great tutorials is much better than having one good one. For those of you who would rather contribute to making the tutorial (that exists on the same web site as Tcl 8.5) better, please submit your suggestions for improvement. Having online docs for Tcl be the best possible is a great idea.

RLH - example code. That would be one of the better things to have in the docs that ship with 8.5. Sometimes as a newbie to Tcl I don't quite grok the syntax but an example clears that right up.

LV Example code is a great thing to have. Good example code - best practice quality - is even better. Don't show code that, if someone comes around using, the response would be but no one would code it that way.

DBP Also, I keep seeing reference to the "dozen rules"...but can't find a page that tells the dozen rules! A nice little page saying what the dozen syntax rules are, with illustrations of each, would be very helpful for a newcomer like me. Especially if you link it from the "dozen rules" sentence on the homepage...

RLH I think this gives the 12 rules of Tcl 8.5: http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TclCmd/Tcl.htm

Lars H: Here on the wiki that dozen is often known under the fancier name "the dodekalogue".

AM (10 june 2005) Now that the Tcl tutorial is well on its way, I thought it a good moment to contemplate the Setup of a Tk tutorial

RLH 2006-01-08: A few of the links above are dead or have information that no longer applies to Tcl. Should a person remove these to help in cleaning up the wiki?

NEM Yes, please do. The links are still available via the revision history if someone disagrees about a particular link.

LV It would be preferable before deleting the links to confirm, if at all possible, with the site that the resource is gone, and not just moved or possibly off line temporarily. Also, before deleting, see perhaps if you can change the link to go through the archives at http://www.archive.org/ to find the resource.

"A Tutorial Introduction to Tcl and Tk"

LV So, where do we find this introduction? Is this a reference to [8]?

Anyone know of any online tutorials that cover using Tcl as the language to do web development? There is http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/index.adp - Tcl for Web Nerds - which teaching an intro to Tcl using AOLServer as the web engine. After you complete this brief intro, there's a couple other tutorials mentioned in the summary that lead the reader along the path of learning more about AOLServer and Tcl and web development. http://tcl.apache.org/websh/examples.ws3 is another, older, tutorial.

Category Tutorial Online Tutorials

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