Delphi was the successor to Borland’s hugely successful DOS-based Turbo Pascal and its less successful Windows Pascal (even I can hardly remember that – I think it was called ‘Borland Pascal With Objects’ or something equally unmemorable). At the time, Delphi was, in my view, far the best visual (drag-and-drop, design-and-code) environment for Windows. Its only real competition was Microsoft’s Visual Basic. The trouble is that no matter how visual you make Basic, it’s still Basic. Whereas Delphi used a very nice version of Pascal that had a reasonably modular unit-based system, good Object Orientation and also had low-level features for anyone who might be missing C.
Anyway, Delphi is still going strong. It’s owned by Embarcadero these days and you can get a free copy here: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download
To celebrate Delphi’s 25th birthday, I’ve just released a book for new or intermediate Delphi programmers. It’s called The Little Book Of Delphi and it’s available in paperback or as a Kindle eBook from Amazon.
The book covers:
- Fundamentals of Delphi
- The Object Pascal language
- Object Orientation
- Variables, Types, Constants
- Operators and Tests
- for loops and while loops
- Procedures and Functions
- Parameters and Arguments
- Arrays and Lists
- String Operations
- Case Statements
- User-defined Types
- Constructors and Methods
- Creating and Freeing Objects
- Inheritance and Encapsulation
- Virtual and Overridden Methods
- File-handling
- Text files and Binary files
- Streaming and Serialization
- Errors and Exceptions
- ...and much more
Here are the links:
Amazon (US)
Paperback: https://amzn.to/37ZJqHF
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0854D12GJ
Amazon (UK)
Paperback: https://amzn.to/392AJxm
eBook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0854D12GJ
