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Inside Delphi 2006 (Wordware Delphi Developer's Library) Review by Ernest Blackmore
Inside Delphi 2006
I have been a Delphi programmer for a number of years and read many Delphi books and this is by far the most basic. It is also the most difficult to follow. The Mr. Hladni mixes Delphi and C++Builder into one presentation. So if your interest is only Delphi (which seems to be implied by the book title) then take about half of the 727 pages and throw them out. Another difficulty in the manor of his approach is the examples his uses. The examples in the first 10 chapter are console applications - get real DOS. I had the feeling that he pulled parts of old material together and manufactured this book. I have always been critical of the example code that books use for their simplicity. This book goes to the extreme. The best example of this simplicity is chapter 23, Creating Win32 API Applications. All of the examples used in the chapter are basic components of Delphi - forms, buttons, list, etc. Delphi hides this complexity from programmers and there is very little need to create a form using direct API calls, so why doesn't he have examples that are more pertinent? If I were a non-experienced Delphi programmer and I read this chapter and I would come away confused at why I would want to create a Win32 API program. As an experienced programmer I found this chapter a waste of time and skipped through the material in about 2 minutes.
When he did address newer features than Pascal coding from the 1980s he did not point out or almost never that it was new/modified, whatever, the reason for the change much less the significance of the change. Needless to say you will not find a chapter entitled "New Features of Delphi 2006" and sadly that is the reason I bought this book.
If you are new to Delphi then you may find this to be a good primer, but I would suggest that as soon as you complete the book to get another to expand your knowledge of the current product (Mastering Delphi 2005 by Cantu for starters). For experienced programmers this book is a waste of time and money.