Book Review: Building Internet Applications With Delphi 2

Review: Building Internet Applications With Delphi 2

Building Internet Applications With Delphi 2
Davis Chapman et al.
Que Corporation
624 pages + CD-ROM, USD $49.99
ISBN 0-7897-0732-2

Today, when Windows is everywhere, programming the Internet with RAD tools suchs as Borland's Delphi seems more and more applicable. Chapman's book tries to shed light into this subject.

The task is not easy, because the Internet really isn't a simple thing. Basics, like e-mail, FTP and WWW seem simple, but under the hood they require a lot of work. The book starts by telling you what you can do with the Net on a high level. When you know what you can do, you will learn how to do it.

First, you will learn about IP addresses, and Internet communications protocols in general. Although these discussions don't go into minute detail, you will get the work done. The next mandatory discussion is of course about the sockets and WinSock programming in particular. When you know these, you can proceed into real world application development.

You start by writing a FTP client. The code and procedure explanations are good, and include many great tips. They are also arranged so that you can use the book later on as a reference. So far so good. But nothing ever comes free.

If you read the text (and notes) carefully, you can see that the text is not absolutely professional. For example, the FTP client uses passive mode because the author couldn't get a PPP connection to work. Personally, unprofessionalism is one thing that I really hate. If you take the quest of writing a book thick as this, you surely have time to solve thiskind of problems.

When you read futher, you will learn how to write a e-mail client and a NNTP (Usenet news) client. These two protocols are quite similar, but still both protocols are discussed with lengthy explanations.

When you have read through these, you will learn about WWW and CGI. These hot topics are good, but lack the detail. Still, you learn the basics, and get the job done on a appropriate level.

The third logical part of the book is about Internet security and Netscape API. You will learn about RSA, SSL, STT, and more. The chapter on security is probably the most interesting in this book, and would have deserved many more pages, although they have almost nothing to do with Delphi programming of course. Not surprisingly, the Netscape API is once again discussed on high level although you get explanation of almost every possible function.

After this, you will find the extensive appendixes, which take almost 100 pages. These appendixes are great, giving you for example information about protocol reply codes, RFC document numbers, and e-mail message headers.

At the end of the book, the feelings are a bit mixed. You've read a lot about everything, but you still don't know about the topics as much as you could. If the discussions were only a little bit more detailed and professional, this book would be great. The exhaustive CD contents are of good value, but won't save the book. It simply leaves something to be desired. Three stars.