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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I came across Expect while I was trying to find a programming language to automate certain tasks in my experiments. After seeing how practical it was with automating command line sessions and I decided to get this book.

The book covers many topics relevant to developing Expect programs along with a good introduction to Tcl, which made it quicker for me to ease into writing Expect code. The book is self-contained and after reading a few chapters, I was able to automate FTP and SSH sessions with Expect programs. The book is very useful if you are a beginner Tcl/Expect programmer. However for some advanced topics, I found myself searching for answers on the man pages and the Internet.

In summary, I recommend this book for people, who need a good introduction to Expect but don't want to start from Unix man pages.

I came across Expect while I was trying to find a programming language to automate certain tasks in my experiments. After seeing how practical it was with automating command line sessions and I decided to get this book.

The book covers many topics relevant to developing Expect programs along with a good introduction to Tcl, which made it quicker for me to ease into writing Expect code. The book is self-contained and after reading a few chapters, I was able to automate FTP and SSH sessions with Expect programs. The book is very useful if you are a beginner Tcl/Expect programmer. However for some advanced topics, I found myself searching for answers on the man pages and the Internet.

In summary, I recommend this book for people, who need a good introduction to Expect but don't want to start from Unix man pages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?