Rating: 
Summary: The best Delphi book I have found so far!
Review: This book is excellent in many respects, even for the programmer fairly new to Delphi. Here is why:It offers a full chapter on standards (though you have to print it out yourself since it is on the CD). This helps you get started on the right foot in writing maintainable code. Its examples are complete within the text. This may not sound like much, but it is. Other books only present code snippets, and rely on information presented earlier or on CD. The benefit to a newbie is that you have the complete context for the written explanation without having to insert a CD and without having to jump back to an earlier chapter to see what is missing, or having to load the full code into Delphi and try to follow both example code and written text and figure out where the snippet fits into the full code example. I found the other good book, Mastering Delphi 5, by contrast much more difficult to follow because the author assumes that you mentally have the surrounding context from earlier chapters (you can't jump to a chapter on a subject of interest and have it stand alone). Marco's book tends to favor showing you what is in essence a textual representation of the form rather than the code that you will write. He also has a habbit of saying I'm going to show you how to do X, then his example says but I have added these extra twists (don't confuse a concept by adding in new ones). Having the complete context is invaluable when you are away from a computer. Lastly, the code is by far the best I have seen in terms of examples of how to write clean easy to follow and maintainable programs in Delphi. Using thier code as templates for how to do things ensures you that you will have very readable code. There is much, much more in this book. If you can only afford one this is the one to get! As to what I would like to have seen more of, and the area that needs better explanation and examples, it is "inheritance" and how to use it. The book relies on it heavily in its examples but does a rather weak job of fully explaining it. Not that any of the other books do a better job because they don't. It seems to be an area that is glossed over. While it is intuitively obvious that this is a very powerful feature, it isn't very clear as to the mechanics of usage. Here it assumes intermediate or above understanding of OOP inheritance. I also found the MIDAS section to be difficult to follow. Unfortunately, Borland has chosen to name many components with names that or so similar that it is confusing to follow because you are not sure what component is being discussed (especially when client side and server side components have very similar names). This is made all the more confusing when the discussion refers to the class of the component and the component in the same paragraph. Discussions with TDataset, TProvider, TDatasource, TDatasetclient can become very confusing to a newbie. A better approach would be to start out the the specific components in an example, such as TQuery to TTable and then later broadening the discussion to include the class by indicating that whereever a component was shown in the example, one could have used any of the components from the class. This is an area where top down does not work very well. Better to start with simple concrete building blocks and build up to the abstract level.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect!
Review: Whether you're a beginner, intermediate or professional, this is probably the only Delphi book you'll need (except if you're interested in some specific topics like 3D graphics). It covers every Delphi feature, from the basics to advanced. Database developing, some important aspects of Windows kernel, messages, GDI, ActiveX/COM, CORBA, MIDAS and lots more. Provided with lots of great examples (printed and on a CD) and some trial third-party software, this book is definilely worth the money.
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