Customer Reviews

Delphi 4 Developer's Guide with CDROM (Sams Developer's Guides)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is enough material for teaching c/s, tiered applications, sql information and many titles that imply database developing. Sure there are lots of things for non-database developing...

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it does provide a lot of material(ActiveX, OpenTools, MIDAS) that doesn't seem to be concentrated in any single book. On the other hand, the book is not well thought out, the writing is dreadful, and a good chunk of the material is rehashed from the book that comes with the product.

If you want to buy just one Delphi book, and need to know about a lot of different topics, this *might* be the one for you. But don't use this book to learn Object Pascal. (Use the Delphi 5 help file and/or Ray Lischner's "Delphi in a Nutshell".) Don't rely on it for basic Win32 concepts. (There are many C-oriented books on this subject, and reading them with a Pascal eye is good practice.) Do buy this book if you want to explore a lot of different Delphi topics.

A note on the text. Out of 37 chapters and appendixes, 13 are supplied only as PDF files on the CD/ROM! On the other hand, many, many source code examples (I haven't the heart to count them) that *should* have been on the CD/ROM only, are in the hard-copy text!

This is the best book out there on Delphi 4. Delphi has always been my favorite development environment, it is better and more powerful than Visual Basic 6 (Though I use both and VC++ 6). If you are a total beginner then you should think of getting "Teach Yourself Delphi 4 in 21 days" simultaneously along with this book. I was able to create moderate Delphi apps within two months of doing so. Delphi has a steeper learning curve as compared to Visual Basic but it's worth it...

Khurram Zaveri

I'm sorry I have to disagree with so many generous reviewers. It seems that time has passed Xavier and Steve by.

Most of the good and accurate material in this book is re-printed from the Delphi 2 edition. Most of the new material (regarding Midas and Corba) is thin, missing from the book, missing from the CD-ROM, or just flat-out inaccurate. Xavier and Steve remain great authorities on the Object Pascal language, but they are not much help with the cutting edger technologies found in Delphi 4.

I was really hoping detailed information on MIDAS and CORBA. If that is what you want, see Charlie Calvert's book. It doesn't provide you with everything you need know, but it's a lot better than the "Delphi 4 Developer's Guide"

Most Delphi book treat COM-Based Technologies lightly. This book doesn't. For advanced COM programming this book is a must. Not for beginners.

The authors did a great job on explaining the various topics. The only negative I had, some of chapters were not in print, only available on CDROM. Also, the authors did a great job answering any questions I might have about the book.

I was disappointed in this book. Although the authors obviously have a solid grasp of Delphi, they do not convey that knowledge effectively. The examples are very limited, and are not explained well enough to allow the reader to adapt them to his needs. Additionally, large chunks (10-15 pages at a time) of the book are devoted to unexplained code snippets, which do not do much to help the reader understand Delphi.

Teixeira and Pacheco have done it again! Another classic for Delphi programmers.

I do not care for the hybrid packaging used by the publisher, as fully one third of the book (13 out of 35 chapters) can only be found on the included CD-ROM. This work is for intermediate to advanced programmers, and is written by two authors with a proven track record. So, why couldn't the publisher print all 35 chapters in a two volume set and spare the reader the inconvience of reading 13 chapters off of a computer screen?

This book covers many very important areas of Delphi programming. Book starts with Main Window class, variables, arrays, etc., covering many Pascal basics, etc, then it covers some API, Messaging basics, DLLs and COM basics (extremely boring examples) on less the 100 pages, the ActiveX on les than only 70 pages, Database development basics again, very basics of Internet programming, and many other like this.

I have to admit that book is written *nicely* and has attractive and easy explanations, which makes the reader understand everything. I wanted to point out that this book is excellent for a beginner who wants to know wide range of elementary of Delphi. It leaves you an impression that you are good and that you know the stuff now. Which is partially a true - you will perhaps understand all that is written - but that's not all, there is much more behind that.

Therefore don't expect that you will find the real stuff, real tricks, and solutions to real problems. This is *not* a book that you'll need while working on a real project! - If you know all basics then you don't need this book - except you have forgotten some of them.

I was developing some COMs, DLLs, and this book didn't help me at all. I also was reading articles in various Delphi magazines, some of them written by Steve, and there is always the same issue: all examples are just superficial (give you only a scheme how to construct the code). Everything works if you just copy an example, but the author leaves you at that point. No further explanations, no details on why is solution like that. If you go on developing, you will find yourself asking numerous questions: how to do this and that, why this crashes, why I got null in this callback, and many other serious questions. This is why I said that this is only a *basics* book. It leaves you an impression that you understood everything mentioned in chapter and that you know the stuff now - but you don't.

Finally, 4 stars is for the certainly the *best* book that nicely introduces huge capabilities of Delphi (I have read many other books: Mastering Delphi, Unleashed, and similar books that cover all Delphi). *But*, if I had to rate how this book is useful for real life programming problems it would be *1 star* only. You will need to buy some other book for COM, WEB programming, etc., because, one more time, examples are too simple.

Author leaves the web site and email to ask or to send comment about the book, but don't bother - Steve doesn't read that. At least the site seems to have some code fixes.

I have seen other versions of this book for Delphi 5 and 6, some of things were fixed, but it is still written in the same manner.

I found this book to cover subjects simply not found in other books. The text displays a solid understanding of design and implementation not only of Delphi and Object Pascal but solid programming techniques and program design. My only criticism of the book is that many of the code examples (while well explained) lead nowhere. Strong on developing and explaining the steps many of the examples show no actual use of the code you spend hours typing and reviewing afterwards. I would like to see this corrected in future books. Still, this is a solid text for intermediate and advanced developers.