Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic Reference
Review: Coming from a builder background, I found delphi familiar, but I needed to find a reference to get some additional insight into object pascal.To my pleasant surprise, not only was a presented with a great reference, but have opened my eyes to some different ways of doing things in both builder and delphi. With so many books simply rewriting the same stuff, I found this book to be an excellent read. Regards
Rating: 
Summary: Love It
Review: Great book for intermediate programmers. Plenty of source code but it's chopped up and difficult to follow. The section on Creating Components was very useful to me. The CD is great, has many undocumented toys on it.
Rating: 
Summary: Some parts are ok.
Review: I found this to be a fairly useful book. I usually refer to it AFTER I have looked at Mastering Delphi 5 by Marco Cantu. Probably the most useful thing that I found was not in the book at all. It was on the included CD...Chapter 8 of the PDF document has a section on Raster/Vector fonts that I found VERY useful.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad at all
Review: I just got a new programming job based in a Delphi environment. I was trained to work in Java and VB; fortunately the syntax was not too different so I picked up this reference book. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a single reference book made the transition go that smoothly.
Rating:
Summary: I've used COM extensively without ever having used ASP.
Review: I'm not sure where Charles is coming from. I've used COM extensively without ever having written an ASP page. 1. I've used COM for OLE Automation purposes to control various off-the-shelf productivity software (Microsoft Office, etc.) 2. I've used COM to interface a program I wrote with a custom program a consultant wrote for my agency. One program would kick off the other, and then they would talk back and forth. While there are lots of ways to do this, COM was what we chose. After writing my review a week ago, I remembered another area where Delphi 5 User's Guide was useful to me. The book includes a function called "ProcessExcecute" that wraps a couple of tricky Win32 System functions. These few pages saved me quite a bit of time on a recent project. Because of this, I have to upgrade my review to 3.51 stars (rounded up to 4 :-D). It's hard to comment on a book of this size, remembering every little thing about it. Also, all comments are going to naturally be skewed by the reader's most recent experience with the book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book - but geared towards Delphi Enterprise
Review: If you have seen D4 Developer's Guide, the D5 version extends over the previous one. It contains everything an intermediate to advanced programmer normally does but it does not help somebody to go forward into new technology areas such as XML/Internet without having MIDAS. I know lot of people who go the XML route (including myself) without using MIDAS. Also, the TParser class has not been explained in this book. A lot of people are not even aware of the existance of such a class. Hope that D6 Developer's guide decides to throw away old stuff and help us get onto the new.
Rating:
Summary: No Delphi Guru Wants To Be Without This Bible
Review: Ok, first things First. Click The Buy Button and come back and read this review. You simply cannot go wrong with this book. Previously I had brought Mastering Delphi 3 & 5 and thought they were good (which they are), but sorry Marco, the best delphi book mantle has been past on. Ok, D5 Developer's Guide. What this book doesn't cover isn't worth knowing. A brief contents listing... * History Of Delphi (Interesting Read) * Object Pascal Language Overview (For the newbies) * Win32 API overview (and yes, you do need to deal with the API from time to time) * Coding Standards (I mean, this book even tells you how you should write the code! ) * Using ActiveX Controls * Graphics Programming * DLLs * Printing * Multithreading * Help with Porting your apps to Delphi 5 (And we are only half way through the book) * Writing your own components (400 pages to this alone) * Database Development (Desktop, Client Server, Midas and Corba) (4 Chapters) Over 1500 pages of information. What with this book, the two Tomes Of Delphi, Win32Api references and Mastering Delphi 5, there should be enough information there to make a Guru out of a first year college student. Seriously, I cannot rate this book high enough. Don't worry about it not being worth the money - it is. Every Penny. The only problem with this book is that some of the chapters are on the CDROM (however, they are the ones that you might want to read once in a while) and that you might pull your back picking the book up. (Just remember the correct lifting stance).
Rating:
Summary: Good but
Review: The book is well written, however some chapters are avaliable on CD only with no print permission. I do not like reading books on my computer screen. If you don't like ebooks like me find another book
Rating:
Summary: Good but
Review: This book had a lot of useful information, but the formatting and the usage of the companion CD drove me crazy. Here is and example: I'm reading along and I finish chapter 5 only to find chapter 6, 7, and 8 are on the companion CD. For now I skip them, and go on to chapter 9. When I'm finished with that I find that chapter 10 is on the companion CD and it has all of the coverage on printing (one of the subjects I need), so I open the CD and start reading chapter 10. This is something like 54 pages, and it has some good subject matter. I decide to print a couple of the pages only to find that they have their security setting set so you can't print ANY of the book chapters (or highlight, so you can't copy and paste items). In all, the companion CD contains 447 pages of non-printable text from random parts of the book. If any subject interests you all you can do is write a note as to the page number and location on the CD, nothing else is allowed. I found it very hard to read an electronic page or two and then try an example and keep on flipping back and forth electronically. If this doesn't bother you then this may just be the book for you. I felt the information was good, but a book that can't be put on paper isn't for me.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Information, but the usage of the CD drove me crazy
Review: This book had a lot of useful information, but the formatting and the usage of the companion CD drove me crazy. Here is and example: I'm reading along and I finish chapter 5 only to find chapter 6, 7, and 8 are on the companion CD. For now I skip them, and go on to chapter 9. When I'm finished with that I find that chapter 10 is on the companion CD and it has all of the coverage on printing (one of the subjects I need), so I open the CD and start reading chapter 10. This is something like 54 pages, and it has some good subject matter. I decide to print a couple of the pages only to find that they have their security setting set so you can't print ANY of the book chapters (or highlight, so you can't copy and paste items). In all, the companion CD contains 447 pages of non-printable text from random parts of the book. If any subject interests you all you can do is write a note as to the page number and location on the CD, nothing else is allowed. I found it very hard to read an electronic page or two and then try an example and keep on flipping back and forth electronically. If this doesn't bother you then this may just be the book for you. I felt the information was good, but a book that can't be put on paper isn't for me.
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