Books Part 3 - This Time It's Personal

"So many books, so little time."
-- Frank Zappa

I've written about the resurgence of new Delphi books before (here and here). Since then, I am pleasantly surprised to find even more, including new publications, updates and some that I missed, several of which are free e-books.

If you know about any other recent Delphi books, please let me know in the comments.

Free (and inexpensive) Tools From Embarcadero

I can (and sometimes do) argue the benefits of Delphi all day long, but if you're just starting out or aren't using it for paid development, the price can be a barrier to entry.

So I was glad to see Embarcadero offering the Starter edition for free (until Sept 9th) and a Delphi Boot Camp, a free five day training webinar beginning on September 5th. Replays will be available afterwards. If you don't want to go looking for the replays, then sign up for the event, even if you can't watch it live. A notice is emailed to everyone who is registered when the replays are published.

All registered Delphi users, including users of the Starter edition, have access to an electronic copy of the Object Pascal Handbook written by Marco Cantu. This is the definitive writeup of the Object Pascal language as it exists in Delphi today and has been updated to cover 10.1 Berlin.

Nice

Embarcadero also had a C++ Boot Camp not long ago. The replays and Q&A are online, now. The promotion for a free license of C++ Builder Starter has expired, but there is a new promotion offering a heavy discount.

New Developer Skill Sprints for 2016

Embarcadero wrapped up their 2015 skill sprints with a bang. Dave Millington gave a great presentation on writing plugins for the Rad Studio IDE using the latest APIs. If you've ever been curious about how to put something in the splash screen or about box or how to draw in the code editor, Dave covers all of this and a lot more. The replay is available here.

Developer skill sprints are short technical presentations made by Embarcadero staff, users, partners and MVPs that focus on a single topic. There is a new Delphi skill sprint every Tuesday with the C++ equivalent on Thursday (if you're in to that kind of thing). There are aired at three separate times to help accommodate people in different time zones, followed by a live Q&A with the author. If you can't catch these live, replays are published online. Allow a little bit of time, though. The replays include relevant parts of the Q&A, so they require some editing.

Embarcadero announced their skill sprints for the first quarter of 2016. Hopefully there's a little something in there for everyone. I know I plan to sit in on four of the first five. Especially the one on data visualisation tomorrow. Nice.