Learning Delphi

Question

I was asked in my current job to learn Delphi 2006. I received a couple of old books Essential Pascal and Essential Delphi, but I don't think they are of the highest quality (I'm currently reading Essential Pascal and its not good). Since Delphi is an old technology (the latest book on the subject was written in 2006 in Amazon), I was wondering what was the best approach to learn it. What topics should I master, what books should I get, site to visit . TIA

Answer 1

Delphi is well alive, as there just was Delphi 2009 (and by now Delphi 2010 and Delphi XE) released. There are some good websites available, especially DelphiFeeds.com, a collection of all major delphi RSS feeds. There also are user groups and forums that can be reached from there. Also you will have access there to the great community of component builders.

Other then that it really depends on what you allready know. OO concepts, Object Pascal, event oriented programming ...

Answer 2

The "Mastering Delphi" books are still very useful in the latest win32 Delphi versions. The same author also has a Delphi 2007 for win32 book. You can't find it on Amazon since he publishes it himself. See http://www.marcocantu.com/dh2007/ I am pretty sure he will also write a Delphi 2009 for win32 book.

Answer 3

You might find the points and links mentioned here on earlier Stack Overflow question useful, too. :-)

Answer 4

Tnx you all for your answers, they rally helped me.

Answer 5

I would second the Mastering Delphi series. Marco Cantu covers a lot of material, even the older copies are useful with the latest versions. If your company is on Delphi 2006, I would suggest upgrading to Delphi 2007. The help system is 10x better and the IDE is faster. Plus Delphi 2007 can use the compiled packages from Delphi 2006 (for the most part).

Answer 6

Marco Cantu's books are good, but here are some more resources too:

1. Check out Delphi Basics, they have a lot of great resources.
2. Also there is the Delphi Wiki which has and links to a lot of resources.
3. There are Delphi videos.
4. The Delphi podcast for ongoing Delphi news.
5. And a great place to ask Delphi questions is the CodeGear Delphi forums, although Stack Overflow works too.

As mentioned, it depends on where you are coming from with programming in general.

Answer 7

Essential Pascal and Essential Delphi by Marco Cantu were both written when older versions of Delphi were current although the layout of the IDE has changed and there have been some additions to the Object Pascal language the basic concepts remain the same.

Delphi Basics provides some useful tutorials and is a useful reference that I often find quicker to use than Delphi's built in help.

About Delphi has some tutorials and a lot of interesting guides and articles but the site design makes navigation difficult.

Answer 8

delphi.about.com is a good place to get focused tutorial excerpts that show how to do a particular thing. There's an online tutorial series there, too, that starts you from knowing nothing and takes you through database programming and user interface work.

Answer 9

Another resource worth mentioning is delphi3000, a site with many articles covering many topics. Membership is free.

Answer 10

I was in your place last year, right out of college and hadn't done pascal since freshman year of high-school (not that that helped).

I learned mainly by doing, Delphi is easy to read and lots of people seem to program it in their own unique ways.

I'd offer this advice though, try to learn why certain aspects of Delphi are included, like sets and case statements within records. I spent the last year trying to reinvent so many wheels it's not even funny.

Here's a helpful pointer: Delphi has nearly every data structure you've learned about, (except trees?) inside it. Don't go making a hash table when you've got a TObjectBucket.

Answer 11

A bit of a late answer here, but you can get Delphi books from www.lulu.com. In particular, Delphi 2006 development essentials by Bob Swart see - http://www.lulu.com/content/1148890

Answer 12

A really late answer here, but ...

The best learning tool for everything is a very clear tutorial that simply and visually explains things clearly.

The only thing better than one such tutorial, are thirty such tutorials.

There is nothing better to initially learn and quickly pick up the concepts of Delphi than Nick Hodges' absolutely magnificent work:

Thirty Camtasia Demos in Thirty Days