Review: Delphi 2 Developer's Guide

Review: Delphi 2 Developer's Guide

Delphi 2 Developer's Guide
Xavier Pacheco & Steve Teixeira
Borland Press
1300 pages + CD-ROM, USD $59.99
ISBN 0-672-30914-9

When I visit the local bookstores, I often find many introductory Delphi programming books. Almost always, however, these books are aimed at beginning developers and they often have 200+ pages discussing how to use Object Pascal. However, this time I've found an exception to this rule - a positive exception, that is.

In the second edition of Delphi 2 Developre's Guide, Pacheco and Teixeira have done a terrific job. This book, aimed at the accomplished and expert developers, provides detailed, informative and insightful tour to the world of Win32 and Delphi programming.

In the first part of the book, you learn the concepts of Delphi programming under Win32. This part includes information about the basics of Object Pascal, VCL and overall application design. Fortunately, this part isn't long, and soon you will be heading to more interesting parts.

In the second part, "Real-World Builing Blocks", you will learn how to use OCX controls, GDI graphics programming, multi-threading, component building, OLE 2, BDE, printing, Tools API, MDI, ... Oh well, this is so much that if you don't find anything new to aid you in Delphi programming, you must be a god. And let me tell you: it won't stop here. In the third part of the book, you will see examples of rather long, but still very useful projects, such as an address book and and scheduler.

All the topics in the book are discussed very professionally, and in a such way that, if you quite haven't mastered the subject, you surely know much more about it when you have finished the discussion. All the code examples are from the real world and give you excellent, in-depth solutions. The really good thing is that you will also learn why you should do this or that -- the thing some otherwise good books lack.

The only thing that lowers this books ratings is the fact that there are some things, like typos, that give the impression that this book was put together in a hurry. Actually, these problems are very minor, and you probably won't notice them if don't read the book from cover to cover.

To summarize, this book is probably the best all-around Delphi book I've read. If you hate typos, lower the rating by a really short minus, but not more. Otherwise, give it the full stars, and rush to your local book shop. This book surely has earned its place on your bookself.