Customer Reviews

Exploring Expect: A Tcl-based Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Reading this book it appears that expect has wonderful promise. However the book does not have the type of examples that are complete and lead to understanding. Many times I wished I could just type in a complete example to see the subject in action. Most often the code is incomplete and would require a lot of extra coding to get a working example. For those of us that have limited time to spend on reworking examples this is a royal pain in the gazoo. Hear Hear to the idea posted earlier, that there should be an "expect cookbook". Buy this book because it is the only one available. I can truely say this book manages to be both a blessing and a CURSE.

The good thing about this book is that it gives one a basic back ground of TCL before delving into Expect which, makes it an excellent "quick" reference book to have on the shelf. The only drawback I can really think of is that it is not extensive as it should be to make it an exhaustive reference guide.

Nice book. Worth the money you pay.

If you are a beginner and you survived using this book, consider it as an accomplishment. This book is quite difficult to understand, it takes a lot of testing. Even a short example cannot quite explained by the author properly. The way the author explains something he thinks that all the audience are like John Ousterhout.

This book gave me a headache browsing back and forth looking for some answers. However, I will give Don Libes a 2* because of the effort. Too bad there is really no alternative out there. Once I learned Expect from trial and errors and more headaches I can probably write a better one.

If you are a beginner and you survived using this book, consider it as an accomplishment. This book is quite difficult to understand, it takes a lot of testing. Even a short example cannot quite explained by the author properly. The way the author explains something he thinks that all the audience are like John Ousterhout.

This book gave me a headache browsing back and forth looking for some answers. However, I will give Don Libes a 2* because of the effort. Too bad there is really no alternative out there. Once I learned Expect from trial and errors and more headaches I can probably write a better one.

I bought the book because I needed to create a script with Expect quickly, and nothing on the web really took me step-by-step through what I needed to do. Well, the book is disorganized and anything but to-the-point. I ended up spending a lot of time extracting the essentials, and I had to go on the web for supplementary material anyway! But, as others have noted, there's not much else out there.

This is one of the worst books, written about one of the worst programming languages. The information is scattered and difficult to harvest. Understanding this book and writing code in Expect is a huge headache. However, if you don't buy the book, forget about ever writing reasonably complex programs in Expect. I rated the book five stars because, while not a good book by any standard, it is infinitely better than having no reference at all (which is perhaps why it is so difficult to find information about Expect on the web). It's well worth the [money], but expect to spend some time learning about Expect.

This book ranks right down there with so many of O'Reilly's Books. It has a terrible index, examples that bear no resemblance to anything at all real-worldish, and simple problems/solutions are ignored entirely. Too bad there are so few alternatives.

Enter "Expect TCL" into a Google search and you'll come up with some
valuable info that you'll need to compliment this lousy book from
O'Reilly.

Then get yourself a good book on TCL also.

Expect is a life saver in our unix environment and Don Libes has done a great service to the sysadmins of the world by developing this tool. If I could rate expect, it would get five stars and Libes would get a metal for making my job easier. However, for the book, three stars for poor organization (and everything else previously mentioned by a frustrated reviewer from Boston). I get so frustrated paging back and forth in the book, holding the index with one finger, trying to find the little code snippits I need to do the job. The book starts off well enough and there are wonderful techniques which I have been able to adopt, but as the book proceeds, and the examples get more complex, the explanations wane. How 'bout it, you exepect experts, is anyone out there willing to develop the "Expect Cookbook"?

I felt I was given a simple overview of Expect then Expected to understand the complex examples. This book only helped me to get started with the more practical type of problems I was attempting to solve with Expect, but leaves me looking for more practical examples and more explanation on how to complete the scripts I've attempted to create. The things I wish to know more about are the things that aren't explained very well, and the examples aren't very useful towards solving more practical problems.

One particular area I felt the book really lacked in was its explanation of Expectk. It helped me to understand the fundamentals of it, but didn't give a very good example of a practical use for it. It also didn't explain how to do many of the things I wish to do with it. I almost feel like I need another book just for expectk. It also didn't give any kind of decent help on how to install expect and it's needed components.

If your looking to wet your appetite, then this book will work for you, but I expect you'll be left wanting for more, and possibly confused about many things.

a quick rundown of what I needed to do:

We have RSA fobs that have an algorithmically changing number displayed on them. Logging into a remote machine requires that we check the fobs readout for the current number. Needless to say, it's not possible to automate this part, but all of the other parts are automatable. It took me a long time to find how to "exit out of the automation, and jump back into it", and this is likely one of the more useful features of expect.

As others have said, the structure of this book is not very predictable, and the parts that you wish would be more detailed, are the ones that lack the most info (the actual expect script command, and it's branching structure is only discussed to "one level deep").

In general, you use expect to kludge together apps...so in a sense, expect has grown to be somewhat of a kludge in and of itself. It's a necessity in the UNIX world, but don't expect to master it fully for a long time.