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Mark Harrison and Michael J. McLennan
Addison-Wesley, 1998 400 pp., $39.95 ISBN 0-201-63474-0
Internet Programming with Python
Aaron Watters, Guido van Rossum, and James C. Ahlstrom
M&T Books, 1996
450 pp., $34.95
ISBN 1-55851-484-8
When enough time has passed for someone to write a history of programming in the 20th century, one curious fact will stand outthe most influential programming languages tend to go through a gestation period in which word of mouth and Internet FAQs are more important means of spreading the news than published books.
The solitary book, or at most, pair of books, devoted to teaching such languages often becomes a veritable "bible" to its community: shared, dog-eared, and tattered, read, reread, and revered by the faithful. Over time, with the slow, sure confidence of continental drift, more books covering such languages appear until a mainstream computing technology is born.
The two best examples of these bibles are instantly recognizable by their pet names-K&R (The C Programming Language, by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, Prentice Hall, 1988) and The Camel Book (Programming Perl, Second Edition, by Tom Christiansen, Randal L. Schwartz, and Larry Wall, O'Reilly, 1996).
To this shelf of fame I would like to posit the addition of two new volumes-- the "Atomic Snake" and "Sunset Paintbrush" books. Okay, so these pet names are mine and are unlikely to reach the status of industry vernacular. The former is my pet name for Internet Programming with Python by Aaron Watters, Guido van Rossum, and James C. Ahlstrom. The latter refers to Effective Tcl/Tk Programming by Mark Harrison and Michael McLennan. A quick look at the book covers explains how I arrived at these names.
A splash of sunset-colored paint streaking across its cover immediately establishes the lineage of Harrison and McLennan's Effective Tcl/Tk Programming. The same splash is on the cover of the original Tcl/Tk book-Tcl and the The Toolkit by John K. Ousterhout, the father of Tcl/Tk. (Both books are part of the Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series edited by Brian Kernighan, the "K" in K&R.)
Harrison and McLennan's book picks up where Ousterhout's leaves off. It assumes a working knowledge of Tcl/Tk and a desire to learn how to build bigger applications that go beyond...