Dear Reader, this book is an introduction to the main ideas of the Tcl programming language: If you wish to learn a simple and powerful programming language, this book is for you. To read this book, the only prior knowledge needed is some basic understanding of programming in any language: from C, to Python, Perl, Lisp, if you understand the meaning of function and variable and other basic concepts you should not experience problems continuing to read.
Why Tcl? Because it's a simple and general programming language, that can be used with success to develop applications in short time. Tcl is a programmable programming language, as you will discover later. There are few ideas inside, that it's possible to combine to create programs, and to extend the language in itself in order to attack programming problems in a very direct way.
Tcl was created by John Ousterhout around 1988 as an embeddable command language. Today Ousterhout is no longer actively developing the language, and the evolution of Tcl is in the hands of the Tcl Core Team, elected to direct the development of the Tcl Core in the summer of 2000, and the rest of the Tcl comunity. The Tcl Core Team is working towards the Tcl 8.5 version, that should be released in the fall of 2005.
Why Tcl? Because it's a simple and general programming language, that can be used with success to develop applications in short time. Tcl is a programmable programming language, as you will discover later. There are few ideas inside, that it's possible to combine to create programs, and to extend the language in itself in order to attack programming problems in a very direct way.
Tcl was created by John Ousterhout around 1988 as an embeddable command language. Today Ousterhout is no longer actively developing the language, and the evolution of Tcl is in the hands of the Tcl Core Team, elected to direct the development of the Tcl Core in the summer of 2000, and the rest of the Tcl comunity. The Tcl Core Team is working towards the Tcl 8.5 version, that should be released in the fall of 2005.
