After the successful online publishing of "Essential Pascal", I decided to follow up with an introduction to Delphi. Again most of the material you'll find here was in the first few editions of Mastering Delphi, the best selling Delphi book I've written. Due to space constraints and because many Delphi programmers look for more advanced information, in the latest edition this material was completely omitted. To overcome the absence of this information, I've started putting together this second online book, titled Essential Delphi.
The text and the source code of this book is copyrighted by Marco Cantù. Of course you can use the programs and adapt them to your own needs, only you are not allowed to use them in books, training material, and other copyrighted formats. Feel free to link your site with this one, but please do not duplicate the material (in web sites, CD-ROMs) as it is subject to changes and updates. If you want to distribute Essential Delphi in a CD-ROM with Delphi material or print a few copies for training (in no-profit environments) please contact Marco for a permission.
After a tentative publication as HTML, the book is now available in a single file in PDF format. Due to the high download volume I actually had to put the PDF file inside a ZIP (this isn't really smaller but you'll have to save it instead of downloading the material each time). The download of a single PDF for the entire book is bigger, but you'll benefit from having the entire book easily available on your local computer in one file, rather than having to handle multiple chapters with many files for the figures.
So you can download the file Essential Delphi_103.zip (which is almost 1.2 Mbytes). You can also download the source code in edelphicode103.zip (about 200 Kbyes).
The download file is now on the "Marco Cantu Tech World" Google Group, in the files section (because of traffic problems I've had on my main site).
There are a few more chapters that will be integrated into Essential Delphi but are now separate downloads. Here you can get the version that came with Mastering Delphi 6. Other material is part of the Delphi Power Book.
Please let me know of any errors you find (beside what's already marked as missing or incomplete in the text), but also of topics not clear enough for a beginner. Let me know also which other topics you'd like to see here. Again, hook onto the newsgroup and look for the "books" section, or (if anything else fails) mail to me (removing the "nospam_" and putting Essential Delphi in the subject (and your request or comment in the text).