Tech Quarto: Mobile & Wireless: Teach Yourself Delphi 2 in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself)

Teach Yourself Delphi 2 in 21 Days (Sams Teach Yourself)
enlarge	Authors: Dan Osier, Steve Grobman, Steve Batson Publisher: Sams Category: Book List Price: ~~$35.00~~ Buy Used: $0.81 You Save: $34.19 (98%) New (1) Used (10) from $0.81 Avg. Customer Rating: 11 reviews Sales Rank: 2675807 Media: Paperback Edition: 1st Number Of Items: 1 Pages: 706 Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.8 Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 7.5 x 1.8 ISBN: 0672308630 Dewey Decimal Number: 005.265 EAN: 9780672308635 ASIN: 0672308630 Publication Date: February 1996 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Shipping: Expedited shipping available Shipping: International shipping available Condition: Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More.

Editorial Reviews: Product Description This unique book presents Delphi programming in logical, easy-to-follow sequences that have made the Teach Yourself series a bestseller. The reader begins learning the basics of Delphi and then moves on to more advanced topics. -Guides the reader through a system for learning a programming language in a set period of time -Question & answer sections answer the most commonly asked questions -Includes a detailed study of looping, records, arrays, branching, data manipulation, and more

Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews... Good book for those who already know Visual Basic and Pascal May 31, 1999 If you already know Turbo/Object Pascal and Visual Basic, this is an excellent starting point. This book will give you an overview of the capabilities and power of Delphi as well as general information on Windows basics such as DLL's and threads. It does not, however, serve as your step-by-step tutorial on Pascal or Delphi (If you're looking for it--go see the online documentation). Not for beginners February 20, 1998 One of the worst introductory books I've seen. There are many unrelated windows/OOP topics in the first week. When teaching you the programming, I found the difficulty level is poorly handled. In the first day of real programming, you are taught threads! For a beginner, you have to learn many of the common components by yourself, the book doesn't help you much. The authors claimed to be VB programmers too. They should have read 'Teach yourself VB 5 in 21 days' and 'Teach yourself C++ in 21 days' before starting to write. Frustrating! July 27, 1997 I got this book as part of a Delphi class I took. We spent far too much time struggling with the typos in the code examples and the code that just plain didn't work! I am very new to programming, with a bit of VB4 experience, and found this book very skimpy on the basics of Object Pascal. I wanted more exercises, at least ones that worked. I'd suggest looking elsewhere for an intro book to Delphi Good Beginner Book June 12, 1997 I found this book to be helpful as a way to learn a little about everything in Delphi. I realize that a book would have to be several thousand pages to cover all that Delphi does, so I knew this was a 'taste' of it. It was much better written than the documentation form Borland. I would recommend this book as a way to 'get going' with delphi. Sam's should have included the source code on disk/CD-ROM, but I found it at ftp://ftp.mcp.com/pub/sams/books/TYDELPHI2/tde2src.zip, and that helped Authors shoot themselves in foot. Book limps along. June 4, 1997 This was the second second Delphi book I purchased. I religiously went through it for 3 to 4 weeks and tried every example. Unfortunately, they didn't all work. This became very frustrating because the book did not come with a CD-Rom and I had to type the code in by hand. I eventually found the publisher's web page and spent time downloading the sample code (what there was of it) from their web page. Some of the code still didn't work! I contacted one of the authors (Dan Osier) and his reply was "I will look into this and get back to you ASAP!". That was 11 months ago. Needless to say I'm not holding my breath. Now I'm not going to beat up this book as much as the other reviewers because it does have some good points. It does a good job on multi-media like playing AVI files and it has a terrific 3D rotating cube example that is really mind boggling to watch. This book covers graphics more than most Delphi books I've read and if you're interested in graphics then maybe this book is for you. The book also does a good job covering file I/O on DOS text files, writing simple but fast reports using the Pascal language, and OLE. The rest of the book, with topics on databases, SQL, Interbase, ReportSmith were lightly covered. None of them would make you an expert by any stretch of the imagination. They are only there to whet your appetite. It's more of an intro book to Delphi 2. After you finish reading it, you'll be asking yourself "Is that all there is?". At least I asked myself that. After 3 weeks of typing, I came away feeling "Where's the rest of it?". This book does have some good points but is marred by sample code that doesn't work, no CD-Rom, and it has 3 authors so the book has no real direction. Who is it for? It has far too much emphasis on graphics in the beginning of the book and too little emphasis on databases for it to be useful to someone who wants to use Delphi to create database applications. It is a Jack-of-all-trades and master of none. If someone is having a fire sale and offered you this book for $10-$15, then I'd say buy it because it has a few topics that are explained quite well. But if my house was on fire, this book wouldn't be the first thing I'd grab. Instead I'd recommend Marco Cantu's "Mastering Delphi 2" if you want to learn the Delphi language, or Ken Henderson's book "Database Developer's Guide with Delphi 2" if you want to know how to create database applications in Paradox and Interbase. Both of these books offer much more "bang-for-your-buck" Barry McClure