Mastering Perl/Tk

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 this text you should be able to build Perl programs with an attractive, intuitive GUI interface with all the power of Perl behind it. 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 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; and examples of Web applications written with Perl/Tk and the LWP library. The book also features an appendices on installing Perl/Tk, a complete quick-reference for each standard widget, and listings of all the extended examples in the book.