Friday, August 17, 2018

Summer Books

"It’s always better to have too much to read than not enough."
-- Ann Patchett
Six months ago it was "reading by the fire" weather and now it's "reading on the patio in the shade" weather. Either way, it's always fine weather for reading.

OK, so not all of these are available in the summer, but that's when I learned about them, hence the title.


Delphi Cookbook - Third Edition

by Daniele Spinetti and Daniele Teti

Delphi is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development on different platforms, saving you the pain of wandering amid GUI widget details or having to tackle inter-platform incompatibilities.

Delphi Cookbook begins with the basics of Delphi and gets you acquainted with JSON format strings, XSLT transformations, Unicode encodings, and various types of streams. You’ll then move on to more advanced topics such as developing higher-order functions and using enumerators and run-time type information (RTTI). As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll understand Delphi RTL functions, use FireMonkey in a VCL application, and cover topics such as multithreading, using aparallel programming library and deploying Delphi on a server. You’ll take a look at the new feature of WebBroker Apache modules, join the mobile revolution with FireMonkey, and learn to build data-driven mobile user interfaces using the FireDAC database access framework. This book will also show you how to integrate your apps with Internet of Things (IoT).

By the end of the book, you will have become proficient in Delphi by exploring its different aspects such as building cross-platforms and mobile applications, designing server-side programs, and integrating these programs with IoT.



Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

by Andrea Magni

This book will be your guide to learn GUI Programming with Delphi. It will introduce you to the FireMonkey – a cross platform framework for GUI programming.

The book starts with a brief intro on FireMonkey framework, by exploring its fundamental and architectural details and what sets it apart from VCL. We then move on to look at the FMX in details covering the aspects like, main components, style concept and elastic UIs. We then move on to look at how responsiveness is a key desirable feature and the Do’s and Don’ts while dealing with parallel programming and UIs. We look at cross platform services and platform specific features of the FMX framework before learning about the vector graphics and 3D functionalities.

By the end of the book you will gain insight into FMX framework’s features, style, use of animation etc to build effective UIs and achieve rich user experience.



Hands-On Design Patterns with Delphi

by Primož Gabrijelčič

Design patterns have proven to be the go-to solution for many common programming scenarios. This book will be the only comprehensive guide available covering design patterns applied to the Delphi language. The book goes into finer details of the Delphi language and its capabilities of a runtime library.

This book will take you through a variety of design patterns and explain them with the help of real-world examples. Starting with the short brief about the concept of design patterns and the original set of ‘Gang of Four’ pattern the book will then discuss the most important ‘antipatterns’. Next, you will learn eight most important patterns for each, creational, structural and behavioural type. After that, you'll be introduced to the concept of ‘concurrency’ patterns - design patterns that are specifically related to multithreading and parallel computation. Finally, we’ll wrap up by discussing design patterns that are specific to program design and some interesting categories of patterns that do not fall under the ‘design’ umbrella.

By the end of the book, you will be able to efficiently address common design problems faced while developing applications and feel confident while building scalable projects.



How to Program Effectively in Delphi: For AS/A Level Computer Science

by Kevin Bond

Delphi has been a part of the GCSE and AS/A-Level computer science curricula in the UK since 2010, and this is one of the textbooks that is being updated for 2018.

It would be interesting to hear where else Delphi and Object Pascal are being taught.


Algorithms and Data Structures for Pragmatic Delphi Programmer

by Primož Gabrijelčič

This project is in its early stages, so no details have been published yet, but based on the title and the author, I'm looking forward to it.


Bonus


Delphi Memory Management For Classic And ARC Compilers

by Dalija Prasnikar

Memory management. One of the most basic parts of software development, often kept on the side even though it has the most profound effect on how we write our code.

This book was originally published at the end of last year, exclusively as an e-book. Due to popular demand, Dalija has made her apologies to Gaia and agreed to make it available in print. Don't get me wrong, I love e-books. They are searchable and portable and you can have a bunch of them on a tablet. But there's just something about having a physical hard copy that's deeply satisfying. And they look good on the book shelf.





Previous Delphi book posts. If you know about any more new Delphi books, please let me know.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Wonder how different Primoz's Algorithm book will be from Julian Bucknall's Tomes of Delphi? I guess only time will tell. Lots of good Delphi books out there lately! I'm reading Dalija's memory management book now, excellent work!

Anonymous said...

While Julian's book is good (I have an autographed copy) the Delphi language has evolved so much since then I would expect the book to be very different. Looking forward to it!