Customer Reviews

Mastering Delphi 6

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

 

 

I have little to say other than this book is exceptional. All items are well covered and specific emphasis is placed on the latest changes to the Delphi IDE as well as the latest new features in Delphi 6 (which are superb).

The code examples are clear, bug free and pertinent to the topic at hand. The author's style of writing is superb. His tone is set at the right level, being both factual and very readable. The moment the book arrived, I couln't put it down.

I was a little annoyed that the section on the Pascal language was relegated to the CD, and I felt the section on SQL was sparse (also in pdf format, and on the CD only). However one could validly argue that this book is geared towards the intermediate + level of programmer, and the reader should already be familiar with these topics.

Advanced programmers (a status which I have not yet attained) may be disappointed with topics covered in the client/server sections.

5 stars, once again Mr Cantu! Strongly recommended for intermediate programmers.

I'm a vietnamese student. I would like to tell you my feeling about Mastering Delphi 6. This book is best ! It guides me how to program in Delphi. The book is presented clearly and attractive. I think the book shows me the way go into Delphi 6. I feel comfortable after reading this book. It is the most valuable book which I have. If you do not have it, you should buy it now. Try it ! you will believe I tell the trust. Good bye ! Success attend you !

I bought it for a project I was working on and I must say I'm impress. It has examples for every single scenario and give you the small and big picture of Delphi development.

I highly recommended.

I have had other books by Marco Cantu, including "Mastering Delphi 4". His style of writing is gentle, albeit at times a bit repetitive. He certainly has an over all grasp of Delphi and the "ancient history" of Borland leading up to it and demonstrates a close relationship with the company. His coverage of the "Visual Pascal" portion of the Delphi suite is helpful and fairly complete. Overall I rate this book ****.

The missing * is based on inadequate (in my opinion) coverage of graphics and printing. However, this might be more the result of Borland's inadequate facilities for these two important (to me, at least) areas of development. It seems that development environments have moved away from non-Web based software, and this trend is reflected in books of this calibre.

I did have a problem with the CD that is included with the book. On the CD is an Ebook version of the text. Unfortunately the Ebook wouldn't work on my computer. It turns out that Adobe made some changes to version 8 of Acrobat Reader which causes the Ebook to fail. The only "solution" Sybex offered was to install Acrobat Reader 4.0 from the CD after removing version 8 from the computer. They also told me that version 8 could then be reinstalled. They obviously did not try this, since it doesn't work. A side effect of simply leaving version 4.0 on the computer is that my e-mail client (Mozilla) no longer knows how to handle .PDF attachments. They (Sybex) have a lot of excuses of the form "The book was published in 2001..."

I bought this book to learn Delphi. I have no prior experience in it. I am not even 4 pages into the book, and the author is already telling me that he is not going into any details on the basics of Delphi, but instead, is going to focus on enhancements concerning Version 6. He already assumes I am familiar with the Delphi IDE, and if I am not, I can go to his website and get the information I need. I went to his website, and it is more confusing than the book (needless to say, I cant find his "step by step instructions on Delphi IDE). I think this guy needs to jump off of "cloud 9", and step back down into the real world. I want to learn Delphi, not write a thesis on it, or go off on some intellectual space fantasy into the cosmos. I just want to learn Delphi! This book has over 1000 pages, and already assumes you know Delphi!

I've read Mastering Delphi 3 and 6 and while Marco Cantu does a good job of exposing Delphi to beginners, his style is VERY lacking when it comes to advanced techniques. I also feel he is somewhat condescending in his explanation of technical matters and assumes that his reader is a near-complete neophyte (well that could also explain the popularity of his books). Still, the website complementing his books does show an effort to make it useful and attractive to his audience.

Fairly experienced programmer will find that his writing style in the Mastering Delphi series hobbles learning as in the effort to sound more 'friendly' by not adopting deeper technical terms he takes two paragraphs to explain something which a couple of sentences should suffice to.

Just got this book the other day. Not too much of beginners book if you don't know Pascal. Worthwhile though for Delphi though. I'll learn the Pascal as I go along. There are other books for Pascal as well as the authors own website. Great book so far.