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Exploring Expect: A Tcl-based Toolkit for Automating Interactive Programs (Nutshell Handbooks) | 
 enlarge | Author: Don Libes
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $14.00
You Save: $20.95 (60%)
New (36) Used (23) from $5.58
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 44406
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 602
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.1
ISBN: 1565920902
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781565920903
ASIN: 1565920902
Publication Date: December 1, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Written by the author of Expect, this is the first book to explain how this part of the UNIX toolbox can be used to automate Telnet, FTP, passwd, rlogin, and hundreds of other interactive applications. Based on Tcl (Tool Command Language), Expect lets you automate interactive applications that have previously been extremely difficult to handle with any scripting language. The book briefly describes Tcl and how Expect relates to it. It then describes the Expect language, using a combination of reference material and specific, useful examples of its features. It shows how to use Expect in background, in multiple processes, and with standard languages and tools like C, C++, and Tk, the X-based extension to Tcl. The strength in the book is in its scripts, conveniently listed in a separate index.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 Very readable! December 27, 2008
This was a great book to get started with expect. I was writing scripts in about an hour. I primarily wanted to learn expect to work with Cisco Routers and this was a great primer into making that happen!
 Powerful tool, painful book June 4, 2008
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.
best reference to Expect February 11, 2007
Exploring Expect delivers as the essential reference for any programmer who uses Expect for automation. I have written literally thousands of lines of Expect for automating testing, switch maintenance and data creation. This book describes all the different aspects and utilities provided by Expect. One of the more esoteric parts of expect is the keyword exp_internal which causes the expect interpreter to print, in great detail, how it attempts to match patterns to output from any spawned command. Also, the tracing capability is excellent. You can literally see each line as it executes.
Overall, this book is an excellent description of the expect language and it contains many examples.
Exploring Expect (1994) good but badly needs updating November 22, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Expect is a language that allows users to simulate users for the purpose of automating certain tasks. What Expect does is open a virtual terminal for the process to be run, then looks for certain things in the ouptut from that program and reacts accordingly. Expect as a tool provides methods for automating the creation of expect scripts and more. Expect can be an excellent tool for regression testing from a command line.
When I first started learning Expect, this book was extremely helpful years ago. Back then, this book would have easily gotten five stars from me. Since then, it has become rather dated. It seems that Don Libes could do very well for the Expect community by publishing an updated PDF much in the same way as Subversion publishers have done. This allows O'Reilly to continue selling the hard-bound materials, yet provide us with more updated materials on the web. The hyperlinks included in the book are often broken (who woulda' thunk it after 12 years?).
Not only does the book need to be updated, but because the use of command-line environments has decreased so much over the past 12 years, the need for text-based testing has generally left us. Where the need lies now is in gui-based testing. That doesn't mean that Expect has lost its usefulness, though the amount of usefulness has dramatically decreased.
So, if you need to automate the use of a text-based application interactively, this book will help you with tools to do it. If you're trying to automate a GUI, this is not the resource for you.
Book hits:
o Written well enough with good examples (enough to get users started)
o Still useful reference if you need Expect
o Easy to understand for programmers / script writers.
Book misses:
o Desperately needs to be updated
o Hyperlinks no longer work
o Title misleads users in today's GUI-based world
o Does not address the needs of users automated GUI-based applications
 Cool December 17, 2005
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Have you ever wondered how to create 12000 principle in kerberos from a list of username and passwords, maybe the data is stored in some mysql database? Yeah I had to do that and this book came to my aid.
I have found Expect a usefull companion in many arcane system administration task and this text by Don Libes (many of the examples exists as papers online) is an excellent 'cookbook' and a great starting point.
autoexpect is also a cool simulation tool. try it
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