Customer Reviews

Delphi Developer's Handbook

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4 star:		(1)
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After browsing through countless books that introduce me to Delphi basics, it is refreshing to find a book that dives right into some real hard-core programming. This book is not for beginners, but is indispensible for experienced Delphi programmers who are looking to improve their skills. This is, without a doubt, the best and most useful Delphi book I have ever read.

If you are a serious Delphi developer who wants to work smarter instead of harder this book is essential reading. It shows you loads of really neat tricks and ideas which are not available in any other books on the markert. Some of the examples are a bit raw, but the underlying concepts can be converted into successful commercial products.

Why make things so complicated? Though I'm new in Delphi transitioning from Visual Basic, I quickly found a couple of solutions both verbose and unnecessary complicated. Check out e.g. how M.C. suggests how to treat the Enter key as Tab key and how to read the Shift state; both being solved much simpler by only a couple of code lines if sought elsewhere (Procedure TForm1.FormKeyPress ... If Key = #13 Begin Then SelectNext(ActiveControl as tWinControl,True,True); Key:=#0; end; ... or Procedure TForm1.FormKeyDown ..... If ssAlt in Shift Then ..., courtesy of UNDU letter #14 June 96 and 'Delphi 3 User Interface Design' respectively). However, I'm sure some hardcore programmers will love the sophisticated solution handlings from this book, but this book surely wasn't ment for entry level users looking for easy solutions. Niels Knabe

This book is certainly not for beginners. But if you can read and understand this book, you can become one of the elite Windows programmers.

The material starts out with the assumption that you understand Delphi, Pascal, and object oriented programming. Each chapter grows progressively more complex, and explains the inner workings of the Delphi IDE itself, as written in Delphi.

This is THE book to own for any serious Delphi developer.

Certainly not for the entry level but probably the most insightful Delphi book I have purchased. Advanced everything! The first 4 chapters are the best. Class references, casting, "Fake" casting. Excellent reference for the RTTI (an ablsolute neccessity for Components and Com). Excellent reference for messages and how Dephi handles them, and how you can handle them. Excellent reference on OOP implemented in Delphi (finding classes, components; Owning, parenting; Creating, Destroying). Many explanations on the techniques used throughout the Dephi source code. If you really want to learn Delphi inside-out, I HIGHLY recommend this book. To Marco Cantu, Thank you. I have purchased quite a few books on Delphi that wound up right in the trash can.

A good sequel to Mastering Delphi 3. Good in depth approach that examines not just how to do things but why. I would strongly recommend it to all Delphi Programmers who are serious about getting the most of D3.

John Lam is like aspirin for all of my COM headaches - well done!

I guess my expectations were very high after Mastering Delphi 3. Obviously the et al did a whole lot more writing then Marco in this one. The examples were solid though, and I really enjoyed the CGI chapter. Was dissapointed on the lack of coverage for many of the (advanced) controls missed in Mastering Delphi (Decision Cubes, TClientDataSets,TRemoteServer,etc). Next time Marcus, write it by yourself.

I found answers in this book where I did not even have questions. If you think you know all of Delphi, read this book and find out how much you have overlooked. I am very thankful to the authors. They make me look so much more competent.

any developers can get more programming techniques and hints from this book. It is a book in between level of "Mastering Delphi 3" and "Hidden Path of Delphi 3". Sure you can get advantages from this book if you buy it.