Learning Perl/Tk

1.2. Perl/Tk for Both Unix and Windows 95/NT

As I was writing this book and cursing the fact that I didn't have enough machines at home to write this book with MS Word and test code examples on my Linux machine without booting back and forth from OS to OS, a miracle was happening. The Tk extension for Perl was ported to Windows. By Windows, I mean the overly-large, overly-influencing OS that is the default on most PCs nowadays, Microsoft Windows. Most people don't have C compilers for their Windows machines, but thanks to the work of Gurasamy Sarathy, there's a great binary distribution of Perl and a good selection of the Perl extensions, including Tk. You simply download the binary, run the install, and you're ready to go.

There are no differences between the way you write Perl/Tk applications on a Unix machine and the way you write them on a Windows machine. You can use any simple text editor on either system. There is a small difference in the way you run them; see Appendix B, for details. For now, I'll just say that I prefer to run my Perl applications on Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 3) rather than Windows 95.

1.2.1. Versions

When I started writing this book, the latest and greatest versions of Perl and Tk were 5.003 and 400.202. Since then, a Win32 version of the Tk module has been developed and released. Perl has also had some changes. Right before the book was going to print, the port of Tk800.007 was in beta and Perl was up to 5.004_68 (also beta). I have made every ...