Customer Reviews

Charlie Calvert's Delphi 4 Unleashed

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charlie Calvert is a great writer, a fun philosopher, but most important he knows his stuff. Delphi 4 is a powerful but easy to use visual development tool, and covering it in one book is ambitious but Calvert succeeds. The book is well written(although Calvert can be a bit wordy), and covers such timely and important topics as Creating Components, COM,Internet Programming and,Distributed programming(several chapters) *and* Game programming. This helps put the lie to Delphi's image a mainly a database development tool.

I stopped a 4 stars because major portions(six chapters) of the book are on CD in Acrobat format. I detest reading acrobat documents. I would prefer Calvert cut down on the size of the code samples and cut down some of the wordiness to fit those electronic chapters in the book. Or add another $5 to the price and make the book fatter.

Publishers must know that reading a book at a computer screen is be difficult. Just try relaxing on your couch or riding the subway while reading your PC. Let's just hope this text on CD business is not a trend.

Charlie is an extremely engaging writer in many ways. His philosophy of programming is great reading, and the book simply covers areas (such as Corba programming) that other books do not. For this reason alone, it will be valuable to many.

The book is not a reference book, and in fact assumes a lot is already known by the reader. It is 'pitched' at the experienced intermediate-advanced reader, and in many respects is quite terse.

If you are a programmer interested in advanced topics, the book will likely be invaluable. If you are a beginner get Kent Reisdorph's 'Teach yourself Delphi 4 (+x) in 21 days' before moving on to the extremely useful Delphi 4 (+x) Developers Guide or Marco Cantu's 'Mastering Delphi 4 (+x)'.

Having said all that, it's a useful addition to your bookshelf after the other books, and another perspective which cannot hurt.

If you are on the cutting edge and know Delphi though, you may find this one of the top books around.

OK, tell the truth now - how many computer books do you have on your bookshelf that you DON'T read? I mean perfectly good books that are for some reason almost perfectly useless?

Charlie Calvert may not write the most spartan and pointed reference books, but he does offer carefully written prose that many enjoy reading, and hence will read. What is more useful? a detailed and encyclopedic reference, that tries to beat the on-line help and manuals (and whose index you search in vain twice a year), or something that you will *actually read*, savor, and might remember a bit of?

The truth of the matter is that no single book on any programming environment can cover it all, but if you are a pretty hip Delphi user, and you know you don't know everything, you will enjoy a slow read of Calvert's book, a chapter here and there, with an iced tea in the shade this summer, and find out why Charlie is so well-liked. He comes across like the older programmer that will show you a trick or two about the craft.

There are some down sides to this 1100 page tome. In almost all computer books these days, the index is ridiculously underpowered, say by a factor of 4 to 1, and Delphi 4 Unleashed is no exception. It's hard to understand why. Hey, if their indexes were better, some of the shelfware books might be useful, like looking up an example when you're desperate.

The trend towards putting selected chapters only on the CD is unacceptable. The Adobe Acrobat reader is an ABYSMAL program, and all this defeats the purpose of having a book. I loved having a WHOLE book in BOTH paper and searchable Windows Help format, like Blaszczak's MFC book, but the paper/Acrobat hybrid is a loser. I don't care what they have to do, thinner paper, limiting the scope, but I DON'T WANT parts of my books missing from the book. I will never read these chapters, and I feel cheated.

As things stand, be glad Calvert's stuff that you will read is a pleasure, and very valuable. And it is.

This book gives me a big dilemma! Firstly, I have to say that some parts of the book have got me out of lots of trouble by helping me to understand some difficult concepts that the (so called) delphi help writers hadn't a hope in hell of explaining properly.

On the other hand Charlie does go on a bit. I don't think that at its root Polymorphism is a particularly difficult concept but he leaves you thinking that it must be, because he goes on-and-on about it. The other problem is that he assumes a lot of knowledge. For example there is a buckets of information about COM, ActiveX,OLE and the like, but nowhere does he tell you the relationship between all these things and when/why you would want to use them. This may not be a problem for some readers, but I haven't really managed to get much out of the later chapters as I don't have - and the book doesn't give me - a basic understanding of these Microsoft technologies. Yet Charlie goes on for page after page about the details of how Delphi implements COM, which just got me bogged down and very confused.

Don't think I am being down on this book, I'm not! Just be carefull to make sure it is the book for you. I am quite an experienced programmer, but I have little or no knowledge of Microsoft technologies and as a result found their treatment in this book very heavy going and often next to useless.

IMHO the text could have been a little more terse and they might have got in the chapters that are on CDROM. This practice is simply not acceptable.

I am new to Delphi with less than 3 months of hands on Delphi experience, but I have over 10 years of programming experience. This book showed me all of the features I needed to accomplish my project tasks and then some. Chapters on the Internet, COM, COBRA were very well written and easy to read, but with rich content. I highly recommend this book to any serious Delphi programmer.

It finally arrived, the long awaited (by me anyway) Delphi 4 Unleashed by Charlie Calvert. This book begins with a getting started section that includes details of the enhancements in Delphi 4 that is useful for users of Delphi 3 (and previous versions). However, a small section on the pitfalls developers face when migrating to D4 from D3 would have been welcome. The major sections then continue to creating components, database programming, COM, Internet, distributed programming, and game programming. Each section goes into a good level of technical detail, neither too "techie" or too "newbie". The section on game programming (about 10% of the book) however could have been cut out to provide more room for discussions of ActiveX, COM, DCOM, and OLE. Overall, though, this is one of the best Delphi books I have in my collection.

Takes off where the newbie books end; except chp. 26, which is too low-level for this book. I started with the game programming stuff; now that DirectX 6.1 AND the JEDI-project are there, even an owner of Delphi4 standard (like myself) can tap into fantastic multimedia high-tech, at practically no cost. On p. 1086, Calvert says that he wants to write a book on game and multimedia development with Delphi. OK - I'm waiting!

You can see Charlie Calvert works at Inprise. His coverage of Delphi ver 4 is very wide and detailed. Although not always as techinical as the Mastering Delphi books this book is easy reading and probably one of the best buys for someone new to Delphi or someone who would like to really harness the power of this RAD tool. In a nutshell, this is a book written by a programmer, for programmers. Great going Charlie!

Having read several good (and some not so good) books on Delphi, I would have to say that this book has some of the best content that I have seen. It is not for the Delphi developer just starting out. It does provide good insight into several of the more difficult aspects of Delphi and Windows programming. Several of the sections (including Calvert's discussion of COM) proved to be very valuable. His writing style is very straight-forward and he gives many examples in the book to help reinforce the topics discussed.

Having read several good (and some not so good) books on Delphi, I would have to say that this book has some of the best content that I have seen. It is not for the Delphi developer just starting out. It does provide good insight into several of the more difficult aspects of Delphi and Windows programming. Several of the sections (including Calvert's discussion of COM) proved to be very valuable. His writing style is very straight-forward and he gives many examples in the book to help reinforce the topics discussed.