Exploring Expect: A Tcl-based Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs (Nutshell Handbooks) First Edition

Somehow I lost my old copy of this book. I ran into a situation that Expect was a perfect fit for. I was rusty, so I ordered a new copy. Sometimes shell scripts get too complicated for interactive situations.This book gets you up and running quickly, and then explores the finer points. I quickly solved my problem.The book was delivered in a few days. Made my day!

I picked up  Exploring Expect: A Tcl-based Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs (Nutshell Handbooks)  to get started on a regression-testing framework for common Unix programs. I was also very curious to see how Tcl was used to make this tool.To those ends, I wasn't disappointed. Expect makes it possible to automate tedious interactive work at the interface level. One can write concise, if not elegant, scripts. The cost of brevity, as if often the case with tools of this sort, is directly proportional to one's ignorance of expect's features and how they are implemented. And, if you'd like to approach Tcl by way of example, expect is as good a choice as I've come across.This guide, on the other hand, is often a discouraging chore to read. It's as if a shoebox of index cards, each detailing one specific feature, was sorted through and applied to flesh out the book's outline. Taken individually, these elements do make sense, providing sometimes useful examples, sometimes curious tangents, sometimes tedious cautionary tales of edge cases. Taken as a whole, it's difficult to see the forest for the trees in this guide. One could say this book is good reference material; it is indexed well, and the outline is clear enough. If it had a reference style, I could see that point.The book however has an expository form. It employs inline cross-references and footnotes where a sidebar or a simple table would have been a welcome relief from flipping back and forth. These research-style choices enforce the idea that the book was assembled from notes, and never quite realized as a whole guide. As a result, it's closer in feel to a set of anecdotes than a reference guide. It is a style that, as an instructor, I find often discourages users, primarily beginners or others who do not have a formal technical education.Expect is of course a valuable tool. I'm grateful to the author for making it and sharing it. I'm also surprised, however, that in the last 15 years no one has thought they could do a better job in explaining, and therefore promoting, such a useful application.

Don Libes's book put me in a bad mood, so I will be tough on him and only give 2 stars, although I debate with myself whether 2 or 3 is appropriate. In any case, I look at the current average of the reviews and I see 4 stars, and I think that is too generous. I do not want to base my review on the fact that the book made me sleepy, because that may be more a statement about me than the book. My beef is the author's inability to be a great pedagogue. He has hidden some fundamental information in a later part of the book that would appear at first to be for advanced users. And he has written that section with the lack of clarity that other reviewers have complained about. "Sending Without Echoing" is in Chapter 12 "Send," on page 273.The general problem occurs when a send command is followed by an expect command. The normal echoing of the command sent will be processed by the expect command. This is not an issue in the simplest of examples, and the simplest of examples is all that one finds in the first 160 pages of the book. I ran into an issue when I had send followed by expect and my expect pattern was a regular expression. I contend that this problem should be highlighted BOLDLY at least by the end of the chapter on Regular Expressions. And probably in the preceding chapter on Glob Patterns. But again, the few examples of send followed by expect in the RE chapter do not highlight my issue.Typically, an index, and I have not gotten much pleasure from the index in this book, is not a solution for this because one would not know what to search for when the problem strikes. Only having basic information in the basic part of the book is a solution. The author simply was not born to be a great teacher, despite his otherwise formidable credentials.

I've worked with Expect pretty extensively, writing much test code with it and creating several helper scripts to make things easier. I assume here that you know what Expect is and have decided to use it, thus I'm reviewing the book and not the language.Here's the short: In my experience if you'll be working with Expect, you pretty much need this book. Googling on the word Expect is useless (putting 'Gnu' in front of 'Expect' helps). Further, the two big keywords Expect adds are 'send' and 'expect'. That makes searching for help online tricky. Even with that aside, I simply find that there just isn't terribly much online to help you.So you need this book. Others here point out that organizationally the book leaves some to be desired. I've felt that in the past as well. There have been many times where I knew I read something but haven't been able to figure out what section it would be in when I go back to find it. For this I dock a star for the book.Still, I'm fairly happy with it as it has gotten me going many times.

I am a dabbler not a programmer so found this a little esoteric in places. Authors style of writing takes some getting used to, but on the whole very useful if you want to use Expect. Just be ready to read & re-read and read again to make sure you have understood.!

I had a few admin inteactive tasks to automate and found Expect via Google. I didn't like the online tutorials and some articles had recommended this book. I took a chance as it has had a few low stars. Glad I did. I found the style easy to read, the information easy to get at and the more complex examples a great place to inspire my attempts to be more sophisticated than a quick knock-up. My programs error check and log which I'm really pleased with. Well worth the cash.

In these days of event driven windows programming - this book may seem a little out-dated.The tcl/expect utility can stil be relevant - and I learnt much about TCL, Expect and regular expressions since buying this book. Well written with good humour.

If you're using Expect, then this book is a must. Well-written, informative and comprehensive.

Excellent.