From puoplo@net-mgmt-solutions.com Sun May 10 05:17:30 CDT 1998 Article: 84740 of comp.lang.tcl Path: uuneo.neosoft.com!ultraneo.neosoft.com!news-out.internetmci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!207.207.0.26!nntp.giganews.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!shore!news From: "Gerard Puoplo" Newsgroups: comp.lang.tcl Subject: Building Network Management Tools With Tcl/Tk -- Book Info Date: 9 May 1998 04:34:45 GMT Organization: Net Mgmt Solutions, Inc Lines: 70 Message-ID: <01bd7b04$e5bfcd80$9667a7cc@netmgmt-e2> NNTP-Posting-Host: hmltma-01-150.port.shore.net X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1161 Xref: uuneo.neosoft.com comp.lang.tcl:84740 Cameron Laird brought to my attention that Pierre Vassellerie posted to this group an article asking the following questions regarding the book "Building Network Management Tools With Tcl/Tk" of which I am a coauthor. In response to Pierre's questions: >I would like to have your comments about this book : > >Building Network Management Tools With Tcl/Tk > >It's impossible to find it in France, then I must buy it to Amazon without >looking at it. The book was just released in the last couple of weeks and as of last week wasn't available yet from Amazon. It should be readily available over the next couple of weeks in all book stores that carry such books. The table of contents for this book can be found at http://www.net-mgmt-solutions.com/tocbook.htm. The Prentice Hall Web site http://www.prenhall.com also contains some info. > >I'd like to know : > >1) if the part explaining the Tcl language is quiet a big part of the >book. I'm programming in Tcl for 5 years and this part is of no interest >for me. The book is 65% a network management book and 35% Tcl/Tk training book. It seems like people think it's a decent network management book. At Interop this week a NOC team member and Network Architect from Bay told me very nice things regarding his thoughts on the book and how he was buying the book even though he prefers Perl over TCL for building custom SNMP tools. In another case, a C++ developer bought it for the chapter on Building A Polling Loop since he thought the implementation logic was excellent. He intends to use the same logic for building his own polling loops in C++. > >2) if the explainations about how to built the described applications are >really intersting and useful, even if I'm able to write network extensions >for Tcl by myself. There's no excerpt of this book available. I cannot really comment on how interesting this stuff is but can assure you the sample apps are very useful management tools. Descriptions of the Sample Apps are also available from our Web Site http://net-mgmt-solutions.com/sample.htm. We have chapters describing how to use the Scotty (Tnm 3.0) and TickleMan Tcl-SNMP Api. We advise you use one of these two Tcl-SNMP extensions instead of writing your own network extensions. > >3) if there's any source available with the book. > Yes, but you need to download the sources from our Web site. To do so, you need the username and password from the book. The sources are applications that are written to the TickleMan/Api. We describe in the book how to change this to Scotty and provide an example. Several people who stoped by our booth at Interop this week were blown away by several of our Sample Apps. Some were just surprise with how quickly they were developed with Tcl. Others were suprise that Tcl-SNMP ran on WIN/NT in addition to Unix. Our SampleApp StatusMgr blew people away when they saw (a 100% Tcl application) monitoring 2000 interfaces doing 600+ SNMP get requests per second (12+ Varbinds per Get) and 25+ MIB thresholding checks on a 200 Mhz NT system with 64 M of memory and yet having very fast GUI response. They were surprise to see that Tcl was capable of this level of performance. Jerry Puoplo