What's the best Delphi book for a newbie?

Question

I'm a web developer (PHP, Perl, some ASP.NET) with some desktop app experience (VB.NET, Python, Adobe AIR), but I'd like to learn Delphi so I can write small, Win32 apps that I'll know will work on any Windows or Linux+WINE machine. Right now I'm using Turbo Delphi (2006, freebie), but really need some kind of "Dummies book" to get started. Can anyone recommend a good Delphi book, web site, or tutorial?

Answer 1

Two of the best websites are

• http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/

• http://delphi.about.com/

I know about Delphi have just finished a OOP course that's available here, I cant recommend any books as all out ones at work are very old (delphi 4 old), also check out http://www.drbob42.net/

Answer 2

http://delphi.about.com/od/beginners/a/delphicourses.htm has some free tutorials and other info on Delphi. http://www.marcocantu.com/epascal/default.htm and http://www.marcocantu.com/edelphi/default.htm are some other free tutorials from the writer of the excellent book Mastering Delphi.

Answer 3

If I were you, I'd consider getting a copy of one of Marco Cantu's, or Steve Texeira's books. I have both Steve's Delphi 5 Developers Guide, and Marco's Master Delphi 7; even though I now use D2007, I find them both to be excellent resources, many years after publication. You ought to be able to find second-hand copies on the web. They're not 'dummies' guides at all, but as you already have some programming experience they will help fill-in the gaps when you struggle and will become long-term 'friends'. Anything by either author will be excellent - Marco is still writing great books for Delphi today.

There were any number of 'Delphi in 24hours' type books when the language came out, but I'm not really sure how useful you'd find any of them because your Turbo 2006 is going to have a different IDE to the ones in those books. I doubt any '24 hour Delphi' book will contain too much detail other than using the IDE and writing very simple form/button type apps so I'd avoid spending money buying a book that's mostly about an IDE you don't have. :-)

The 'borland' conference on CIX is one of the best Delphi resources I know of, inhabited by professional Delphi developers and enthusiasts alike, although Cix requires a small monthly subscription and it's a little bit 'pre web 1.0' for a lot of people. :-)

The codegear usenet groups were pretty good places for help too, although in recent weeks they've gone AWOL and Embarcadero have something new to replace them with.

There's a guy called Zarko Gajic who provides Delphi articles to About.com - Getting Started With Delphi his tips and short articles can vary from excellent to fairly mediocre, but it's not a bad place to start.

To be honest though - you're here on Stack Overflow, and there are a number of Delphi folks about. If you have something in particular you're not sure about, ask!

Answer 4

Marco Cantu is a well-known and long-standing delphi programming guide author. He produced a free ebook (Essential Delphi) a while ago, which you can download on this page (download EssentialDelphi_103.zip), and the accompanying source code is available from his website here (download the edelphicode103.zip file).

Answer 5

@robsoft: You can read about the new 'beta' Codegear newsgroups here:

You can access them via NTTP or HTTP

Answer 6

Don't underestimate the manual that comes with Delphi and especially the smaller Object Pascal reference manual, they're both reproduced in the help file included with the IDE.

But if you've got the hard copy handy, that Object Pascal book is more useful and more succinct than any Teach Yourself Delphi book.

Answer 7

Delphi in a Nutshell published by O'Reilly is quite a nice book.

Answer 8

I'd say that The Tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and Data Structures by Julian M Bucknall is my number one book.

I'll admit, it's not a newby-book per-se, but if you've seen your share of algorithms already, then this book offers a great introduction into how these could be implemented in the Delphi language.

Answer 9

i second Ray's Delphi in Nutshell, a superb book, plus it with marco's book or Steve Texeira's. too shame ray didn't re-write/update his delphi book.