Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Delphi 3 in 14 Days (Teach Yourself in 14 Days)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Very EASY to follow. Found a mistake on page 257. Strings must be entered completely on one line. The, " Button1.Click Memo1.Lines.Add('ListBox String #' " should be entered on one line.

A book of this nature has to teach via a useful, comprehensive set of examples. This is not the case with this book. Quite simply, the example applications do not work when programmed acording to the instructions in the book. In many cases, steps needed to get things to work properly are completely ignored. Controls that show up in the code examples have never been placed on the forms, etc.

I've been programming close to 30 years, so I was able to eventually sort things out, but I feel if I had trouble getting stuff from this book, a beginner would be lost. I suspect anyone who finds this boook valuable has had some previous Delphi experience, or has programmed similar tools.

This book is what you need if you want to create a simple application with some database elements. Great examples and explanation.

Well, it's about 2 years since I've been reading this book and I'm still on Day 5. With the best will in the world, it's hard going. It veers from the extremely technical to the airy philosophical without much effort. And whenever it gets interesting we are told "it is outside the scope of this book..." Useless as an introduction.

I've noticed many reviews complaining this book didn't teach anything. I disagree. I've read many Delphi books & I think this book is a good place to start. It doesn't get too advanced... it starts simple, ends simple, and puts you in a good position to move on to a more advanced Delphi programming book.

I ignored previous reviews about the incorrect examples, based on my need to start somewhere. At first, this book was just what I needed. Errors in the Delphi examples were easy enough to figure out in the beginning of the book, but became impossible for me when things got more complicated. It made me frustrated and spoiled the experience.

One of the problems with Delphi is finding good instruction. It's not a language like C++ that has evolved over the years and has widespread devotees using multiple platforms and tools. Forunately, this book is a decent introduction.

On the good side, you'll get a crash course in everything Delphi, from designing forms to building ActiveX controls. Very little space is wasted and quite a bit is achieved, leaving one reasonably confident in basic Delphi development.

However, if you're not a programmer, the book could probably seem to gloss over things too quickly. It's expected you understand why ActiveX is important, etc. Chapters are included to try and introduce one to OOP, etc., but they really seem out of place.

The most glaring omission is NOTHING on error handling. Instead of trying to add some failed focus on the new programmer, adding error handling and other information would have been welcome.

Overall, I felt the book was worth the money, since I program in other languages, I could fill in the gaps. However, this is NOT for a new programmer who wants to learn all the basics.

I read this book when I just started learning Delphi 3, altough I already programmed in other languages I really needed this book. It helped me very much with learning it. All the most basic things of programming in Delphi 3 are showed. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn Delphi 3, after you read this book it's best to read more difficult books with more specific topics. This book is just for the basics.

As a beginner I found the book useful in helping identify the various controls within the Delphi IDE. I found the book quite easy to read. I was disappointed in the two chapters on Object Oriented programming because they did not cover OO at all, although there is an example of the use of the new Variant data type. Apart from a brief description of a class declaration they only covered standard Pascal. Example Delphi programs do not really start until about the middle of the book. The chapter on Software Engineering was irrelevant and no one would have noticed if it had been left out of the book altogether. I found the examples useful but the book made little attempt to ensure that a rank beginner understood the terms used. The authors tended to labour obvious points while failing to explain anything complicated. I got the impression that while the authors were probably competent programmers in Visual Basic they had only read just one more Delphi book than me.

I've never used Delphi or any other programming language. I ordered this book - it's easy and great. I learnt delphi, not in 14 but 21 days. GREAT !