Tcl/TK for Programmers: With Solved Exercises That Work with UNIX and Windows

Mind you, as the title suggests, this shouldn't be your very first experience programming. It's not a "learn Tcl in 7 days" book. You want to have some other languages under your belt first. It's aimed at someone who will digest a lot of information fairly quickly. The writing is fun and humorous. The very first chapters are essential, as Zimmer does everything he can to explain the nuts and bolts behind braces, quotes and variable substitutions. He uses these core pieces of Tcl in ways you will likely never encounter in actual Tcl/Tk programs, but serves the purpose of breaking them, soliciting head-scratchingly unintuitive results, etc. so that when you start coding yourself, you wil know to be careful with your syntax-- know what the pitfalls are and avoid them. If you are patient enough to go through all of the exercises, you will have a very strong and solid understanding of this fantastically elegant and programmer-friendly language. The only part I don't like is that the index at the back of the book is too brief. The book partly makes up for this by having 2 more indices used to locate specific functions and procedures. I recommend you also invest in the O'Reilly Nutshell or Pocket Guide books, because this book is more tutorial than reference in nature.

I wish I had this book a year ago. Most other Tcl books are the "How to create a Tk app", type of thing, that gloss over the details that have you pulling your hair out later. This book goes through the details of how things work, in detail, with excellent "mini-quizes" that illustrate all the important concepts. If you program in another language and need to do work in Tcl, do yourself a favor, get this book and spend a weekend going through it first.