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Tcl stands for Tool Command Language. Tcl is really two things: a scripting language, and an interpreter for that
language that is designed to be easy to embed into your application. Tcl and its associated graphical user-interface toolkit, Tk, were designed and crafted by Professor
John Ousterhout of the University of California, Berkeley. You can find these packages on the Internet (as explained on page lii) and use them freely in
your application, even if it is commercial. The Tcl interpreter has been ported from UNIX to DOS, Windows, OS/2, NT, and Macintosh environments. The Tk
toolkit has been ported from the X window system to Windows and Macintosh.

This early vision imagined that applications would be large bodies of compiled code and a small amount of Tcl used for configuration and high-level commands.
John’s editor, mx, and the terminal emulator, tx, followed this model. While this model remains valid, it has also turned out to be possible to write
entire applications in Tcl. This is because the Tcl/Tk shell, wish, provides access to other programs, the file system, network sockets, plus the ability to create a
graphical user interface. For better or worse, it is now common to find applications
that contain thousands of lines of Tcl script.

This book was written because, while I found it enjoyable and productive to use Tcl and Tk, there were times when I was frustrated. In addition, working at
Xerox PARC, with many experts in languages and systems, I was compelled to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of Tcl and Tk. Although many of
my colleagues adopted Tcl and Tk for their projects, they were also just as quick to point out its flaws. In response, I have built up a set of programming techniques
that exploit the power of Tcl and Tk while avoiding troublesome areas. This book is meant as a practical guide to help you get the most out of Tcl and Tk
and avoid some of the frustrations I experienced.

It has been about 10 years since I was introduced to Tcl, and about five years since the first edition of this book. During the last several years I have
been working under John Ousterhout, first at Sun Microsystems and now at Scriptics Corporation. I have managed to remain mostly a Tcl programmer while
others in our group have delved into the C implementation of Tcl itself. I’ve been building applications like HTML editors, e-mail user interfaces, Web servers,
and the customer database we run our business on. This experience is reflected in this book. The bulk of the book is about Tcl scripting, and the aspects of C programming
to create Tcl extensions is given a lighter treatment. I have been lucky to remain involved in the core Tcl development, and I hope I can pass along the
insights I have gained by working with Tcl.

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