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Books Reviews

Delphi 5 Books

  • Borland Delphi 5 Developer's Guide by Steve Teixeira and Xavier Pacheco. The second Delphi 5 book out after my own Mastering Delphi 5. I've not read it yet, but it should be a very good buy.
    Delphi Books Rather old Delphi Books

    Title Buy Review
    Danny Thorpe,
    Delphi Component Design,
    Addison-Wesley     		Buy Online The best book on Delphi VCL internals, written by a member of the Delphi development team. It doesn't teach you how write components, but how the VCL was designed by Borland. If you want to understand the "why" of Delphi, this is a book for you. It won't teach you how to write your own code, at least not directly. Anyway for Delphi aficionados, this book is a must.
    Ray Konopka,
    Developing Custom Delphi 3 Components,
    Coriolis Group Books     		Buy Online If you want to learn how to write components from beginning to end, this book is a must. Although I cover the development of Delphi components in my own book, this book (and its original Delphi 2 edition) is considered THE Delphi components book and actually stands you to its fame. However, I have to say I was a little disappointed by the new edition, which adds only limited new material. Not all the advanced topics are covered, but if you never bough version 1 and you are serious in components development you should really consider Ray's book.
    Ken Henderson,
    Delphi 3 Client/Server Developer's Guide,
    SAMS/Borland Press     		Buy Online Database and client/server programming are not by greatest expertise, as the readers of my books might have noticed. For this reason I tend to buy all of the books on this topic, hoping to learn new tricks. I still haven't found a database or client/server book I can fully recommend, but this (and the previous book from Ken on local databases) is the only one getting close enough. The coverage includes a lot of foundation material, which is really great if you don't have that background, but also practical advice. However it fails a little on more advanced topics: for example I would have loved to find more information on specific Oracle or Interbase features, although this is actually the only book I've seen devoting at least some space specifically to each server. Maybe I should actually buy a book specifically covering Oracle SQL Server, after all. The book was written just after Delphi 3 was realeased and, for this reason, the coverage of Delphi 3 specific topics, as the 3-tier architecture, is limited. The other problem I have is that with its 1,000 pages there is a little too much filler information, including too many listings (for example complete DFM files, with some useless details). Having said this, if you do client/server development with Delphi this book will provide you with a lot of information and insight you won't find anywhere else (AFAIK), and even if I don't love this book it is a text I keep at hand and refer often to, and definetely a recommended buy.
    Neil Rubenking,
    Delphi Programming Problem Solver,
    IDG Books     		Buy Online This is probably the best "Tips and Tricks" book on Delphi programming, with coverage of VCL and Windows API features and a few database topics. Although a few of the topics have been superceded by the release of Delphi 2 and Delphi 3, most of them are still actual, and the book provides Delphi programmers a lot of knowledge. Neil is a die-hard Pascal and Delphi programmer, the author of the "Delphi for Dummies" book (one of the best introductions to Delphi), and an editor of PCMagazine. His writing style is great, and it is worth buying his books just for this, even if you are not much interested in the topic!

    For more Delphi books, get the Delphi Listing on Computer Literacy web site.

    Windows Books Windows Books

    Title Buy Review
    Matt Pietrek,
    Windows 95 System Programming Secrets,
    IDG Books     		Buy Online If you already know Windows API programming and want to understand the internals of Windows, this book is for you. The text explores how Windows 95 works mainly buy reverse-engineering and publishing the Windows source code. Most of the topics are really very interesting to understand how the system works, although few of them will have a real influence on your daily programming tasks. You can consider reading this book as a challenge, as an in-depth study, or as a sleeping helper, but if you want to grasp Windows 95 this is a good approach. Matt is a former Borland employee, a chief engineer at NuMega (Makers of BoundsChecker), and an author for MSJ. His interest is in debuggers, and the book clearly reflects this (you won't find much on graphics!)
    Stefano Maruzzi,
    Windows 95 Developer's Guide,
    Ziff-Davis Press     		Buy Online If you want to learn Windows API programming from the ground up, beside buying the 'classic' Petzold book, you can refer to this text from an Italian friend of mine. This is how I learned Windows programming, and I'm happy of it. The approach is more techie then in Petzold's book, and the coverage is really focused on Win32. I know there are many other books on this subject, and that this volume is not a best-seller, but I bly recommend it. The code is entirely written in C (no C++), but it is quite easy to recode fragments in Delphi.