Part II describes advanced programming techniques that support sophisticated applications. The Tcl interfaces remain simple, so you can quickly construct powerful applications.

Chapter 10 describes eval, which lets you create Tcl programs on the fly. There are tricks with using eval correctly, and a few rules of thumb to make your life easier.

Chapter 11 describes regular expressions. This is the most powerful string processing facility in Tcl. This chapter includes a cookbook of useful regular expressions.

Chapter 12 describes the library and package facility used to organize your code into reusable modules.

Chapter 13 describes introspection and debugging. Introspection provides information about the state of the Tcl interpreter.

Chapter 14 describes namespaces that partition the global scope for variables and procedures. Namespaces help you structure large Tcl applications.

Chapter 15 describes the features that support Internationalization, including Unicode, other character set encodings, and message catalogs.

Chapter 16 describes event-driven I/O programming. This lets you run process pipelines in the background. It is also very useful with network socket programming, which is the topic of Chapter 17.

Chapter 18 describes TclHttpd, a Web server built entirely in Tcl. You can build applications on top of TclHttpd, or integrate the server into existing applications to give them a web interface. TclHttpd also supports regular Web sites.

Chapter 19 describes Safe-Tcl and using multiple Tcl interpreters. If an interpreter is safe, then you can grant it restricted functionality. This is ideal for supporting network applets that are downloaded from untrusted sites, which is described in Chapter 20.

Chapter 21 describes how to use the Thread extension to create multi-threaded Tcl scripts. The extension provides threads, synchronization with mutexes and condition variables, shared variables, and thread pools.

Chapter 22 describes how to package and deploy Tcl applications as Starkits. A Virtual File System facility is used to create a private file system inside the Starkit to hold the scripts, graphics, and documentation that make up your application.