How to Program Delphi 3

Rating:
Summary: *THE* Beginner Book for Delphi
Review: Frank Engo's book is excellently written for beginners. Delphi 3 for Dummies is *NOT* a good beginner book. D3fD is still a good book, just not a good one for beginners. How to Program Delphi 3 features a large typeface, screenshots, commented code, and it's not a huge book (a 800 page book might be daunting for newbies). Not really a Pascal reference, but because Pascal isn't difficult to read, his comments would immensely explain what is going on at each line. I own at least 8 Delphi books I can name off the top of my head, and if I've ever seen a good one for beginners, this is it.

Rating:
Summary: A Good beginning
Review: I am a Clipper programmer moving to Delphi and I found this book to be an excellent introduction to programming in Borland Pascal.

I have read several Delphi books and really hate the style that shows you how to browse through the DBDEMOS animals in a simplistic--almost childish--window. Then they move on to programming the Windows API or other esoteric topics.

Mr. Engo move steadily from the very simple to the more complex. This is not a book for the advanced user--probably not even for the intermediate--but it is possibly the best for the novice.

He covers topics such as How to dress up your interface, How to create Multiform applications, Common Programming mistakes, Working with Procedures and Functions and How to build database applications -- with and without SQL.

The biggest disappointment--and I particularly wanted help on this--was the section on reports. It refers to ReportSmith (D3 comes with QuickReports!)

An added bonus is a library of functions--including the source code. They are fairly elementary, but an excellent learning tool, especially for those of us who wrote our own libraries in Clipper, and suddenly feal naked when we come to a new language without years of accumulate functions.

If you are looking for a good introduction to Delphi 3 -- I'm pretty sure everything will work in Delphi 4 -- then this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: ITS A GREAT BOOK (FOR BEGINNERS)
Review: VERY EASY TO UNDERSTANSD