In practice, I've found the easiest way to work in this area is with a combination of things already mentioned or eluded to:
widget demos are a handy start
Mastering Tk adds things not obvious in the demos
tools that generate code fill in most of the simple areas (vtk, specperl, glade, ZooZ). You'd be silly to rely on them completely, but they can give a start.
There's also the tutorial here with pointers to stuff...
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