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Rating: 
Summary: A well-scoped dive into Delphi development
Review: I found this book to cover subjects simply not found in other books. The text displays a solid understanding of design and implementation not only of Delphi and Object Pascal but solid programming techniques and program design. My only criticism of the book is that many of the code examples (while well explained) lead nowhere. Strong on developing and explaining the steps many of the examples show no actual use of the code you spend hours typing and reviewing afterwards. I would like to see this corrected in future books. Still, this is a solid text for intermediate and advanced developers.
Rating: 
Summary: Please try harder
Review: I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it does provide a lot of material(ActiveX, OpenTools, MIDAS) that doesn't seem to be concentrated in any single book. On the other hand, the book is not well thought out, the writing is dreadful, and a good chunk of the material is rehashed from the book that comes with the product.If you want to buy just one Delphi book, and need to know about a lot of different topics, this *might* be the one for you. But don't use this book to learn Object Pascal. (Use the Delphi 5 help file and/or Ray Lischner's "Delphi in a Nutshell".) Don't rely on it for basic Win32 concepts. (There are many C-oriented books on this subject, and reading them with a Pascal eye is good practice.) Do buy this book if you want to explore a lot of different Delphi topics. A note on the text. Out of 37 chapters and appendixes, 13 are supplied only as PDF files on the CD/ROM! On the other hand, many, many source code examples (I haven't the heart to count them) that *should* have been on the CD/ROM only, are in the hard-copy text!
Rating:
Summary: Please try harder
Review: I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand it does provide a lot of material(ActiveX, OpenTools, MIDAS) that doesn't seem to be concentrated in any single book. On the other hand, the book is not well thought out, the writing is dreadful, and a good chunk of the material is rehashed from the book that comes with the product. If you want to buy just one Delphi book, and need to know about a lot of different topics, this *might* be the one for you. But don't use this book to learn Object Pascal. (Use the Delphi 5 help file and/or Ray Lischner's "Delphi in a Nutshell".) Don't rely on it for basic Win32 concepts. (There are many C-oriented books on this subject, and reading them with a Pascal eye is good practice.) Do buy this book if you want to explore a lot of different Delphi topics. A note on the text. Out of 37 chapters and appendixes, 13 are supplied only as PDF files on the CD/ROM! On the other hand, many, many source code examples (I haven't the heart to count them) that *should* have been on the CD/ROM only, are in the hard-copy text!
Rating: 
Summary: Simply put, The Most Complete guide to Delphi ever written!!
Review: I've been using Delphi since it's release of Version 1.0 and I've purchased enough books on the environment to fill several books shelves. Xavier and Steve followup Delphi Developers Guide's 1 and 2 with an incredibly in-depth review and how-to book for Delphi 4. They dare touch the aspects of Delphi that few have done and they do it with great insight. If your starting out with Delphi or if your an Enterprise Developer looking to understand COM, DCOM, OLE Enterprise or CORBA, this book is a MUST HAVE!!! If it's knowledge you want, these guys got it! The book is so packed with knowledge, nearly 1/3 of it is on the CD. Don't get caught without it!!
Rating:
Summary: The best Delphi book available!
Review: Most Delphi book treat COM-Based Technologies lightly. This book doesn't. For advanced COM programming this book is a must. Not for beginners.
Rating:
Summary: Excelent book for basics written by unreachable author!
Review: This book covers many very important areas of Delphi programming. Book starts with Main Window class, variables, arrays, etc., covering many Pascal basics, etc, then it covers some API, Messaging basics, DLLs and COM basics (extremely boring examples) on less the 100 pages, the ActiveX on les than only 70 pages, Database development basics again, very basics of Internet programming, and many other like this. I have to admit that book is written *nicely* and has attractive and easy explanations, which makes the reader understand everything. I wanted to point out that this book is excellent for a beginner who wants to know wide range of elementary of Delphi. It leaves you an impression that you are good and that you know the stuff now. Which is partially a true - you will perhaps understand all that is written - but that's not all, there is much more behind that. Therefore don't expect that you will find the real stuff, real tricks, and solutions to real problems. This is *not* a book that you'll need while working on a real project! - If you know all basics then you don't need this book - except you have forgotten some of them. I was developing some COMs, DLLs, and this book didn't help me at all. I also was reading articles in various Delphi magazines, some of them written by Steve, and there is always the same issue: all examples are just superficial (give you only a scheme how to construct the code). Everything works if you just copy an example, but the author leaves you at that point. No further explanations, no details on why is solution like that. If you go on developing, you will find yourself asking numerous questions: how to do this and that, why this crashes, why I got null in this callback, and many other serious questions. This is why I said that this is only a *basics* book. It leaves you an impression that you understood everything mentioned in chapter and that you know the stuff now - but you don't. Finally, 4 stars is for the certainly the *best* book that nicely introduces huge capabilities of Delphi (I have read many other books: Mastering Delphi, Unleashed, and similar books that cover all Delphi). *But*, if I had to rate how this book is useful for real life programming problems it would be *1 star* only. You will need to buy some other book for COM, WEB programming, etc., because, one more time, examples are too simple. Author leaves the web site and email to ask or to send comment about the book, but don't bother - Steve doesn't read that. At least the site seems to have some code fixes. I have seen other versions of this book for Delphi 5 and 6, some of things were fixed, but it is still written in the same manner.
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