Customer Reviews

Kylix Power Solutions with Don Taylor, Jim Mischel, & Tim Gentry

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

 

 

Programming VB can be fun but mainly makes your life difficult with all those dll's and missing reference. Linux is easy and KYLIX is a pleasure to use. The book itself is excellent for a VB or Delphi programmer to migrate to LINUX. It's well written and of good value for the money. I recommend the book to those newbies to Linux, it's a good start. I recommend the book to the Linux enthousiast that want to develop fast, excellent and reliable code. Kylix is a charm to use and the book just make it even more charming.

300 pages - not encyclopedic - but a rich, thorogh introduction to Linux system programming and how to go about it using Kylix. Well worth the money.

I'm a long-time Delphi programmer and relatively recent migrant to Linux. This book absolutely fills the gaps for me in the numerous places where I'm asking "Now, how the heck do I go about doing THIS on Linux?".

It's not about Kylix (although the samples and solutions are in ObjectPascal, of course) so much as about accessing the nuts and bolts of Linux through HLL calls to the OS, MMS and filesystem. Although it is primarily relevant to ObjectPascal it will be a great resource for developers using other HLLs on Linux too. It really fills in the bits that are missing from Linux books, programming books, FAQ forums and so on if your history has been with DOS and Windows and, especially, if you want to cross-plat your Delphi components.

I needed this book a year ago and I'm overjoyed to have it, now that I'm using Kylix 2.

This book stands out from the rest. It is not a book for beginners, but a solid discussion of real world solutions.

Any experienced Delphi developer needs to add this to his/her collection.

Covers topics such as Inter-process communications, semaphores, threading etc. Well written with not so bad example code.

This book mostly provides linux-specific low level operating system solutions (forking, process control, shared libraries, semaphores, pipes, signal hangling, message passing, etc). I bought it because i wanted to know how to do in Kylix things I used to do in C, and I am very satisfied with the information provided. The book is rich in code examples, logically structured, and well explained. It is written in the hands-on style, where an explanation as to how things work is followed by a specific code example. The explanations are straightforward and easy to follow, but in order to benefit from reading the book you should be familiar with operating systems programming concepts like interprocess communication, and have some knowledge of unix (target level is listed as intermediate/advanced)....

In this context, the chapter on Help does not seem to belong in this book, and the book could better benefit from being called "Linux System Programming with Kylix". Also, most of the code examples could be cut by 30-50%. For example, there's no need to list visual object declarations, since even novice can deduce these from the photograph (and they're not essential to the subject matter anyway). Since the book was published, Kylix 2 has been released, and I think the book could benefit from a 2nd edition updated with the changes Borland made in Kylix2. I don't think any essential changes would be neccessary, since operating system concepts do not change overnight. However, there are many times when authors state: "this and that is broken, and therefore you should use the code below," and such portions should be updated.

Overall, this book gets 4 stars from me:
+ 5 because it's the only position on the market with this information, and the information is adequate and presented in an organized manner;
-1 because of the criticism listed above.

This one contains so many useful Linux tidbits and "How to get things done" sections, it is always the Kylix reference I pick up first.