Building Delphi 6 Applications

Rating:
Summary: Who is this book for?
Review: ...at least [I] did not pay full price for this book. The problem with this book is that it doesn't seem to have a target audience. It's not a beginner's book (I am a beginner at Dephi for the record), and it also does not have the level of detail for the experienced Delphi programmer that the other books I have seen in bookstore address. Do youself a favor and skip this one. Mastering Delphi 6 is a good one from what I was able to skip at the bookstore, and I have yet to find an updated beginner's book for Delphi 6.

Rating:
Summary: Good entry level book, a little pricy.
Review: First the bad news. like they said: this book does not have much on the new features specific to Delphi 6. When it comes to the point, it doesn't have much on Delphi 5 features either: it has nothing on the ADO data connections in Delphi 5 and 6, and only a short (but to someone new to it concise and useful) introduction to the Microsoft office automation features. If you want a comprehensive overview of the new features and how to use them, go to Mastering Delphi 6 or the Delphi 6 Developers Guide.

Having said that, don't discount this book. It has a respectable and solid niche. For someone new to Delphi, or a programmer from another language who wants an orientation to Delphi, this book has achieved what no other Delphi book has to date. It provides a succinct, friendly introduction to Delphi and object pascal, and gets you up to date with features such as working with databases and the web to about the level of Delphi 4 functionality. He provides a lot of the material and background that books such as Mastering Delphi and the Delphi Developers guide tend to skip over to fit other stuff in. He doesn't really stop to teach you Pascal itself though (he pretty much assumes you know looping and conditional statements and that sort of stuff, which is often a fair assumption), so if you are really a beginning beginner you might want to find a tutorial on the web or an introduction to Pascal book.

If you are a beginner to RAD or object oriented programming and want to pick up the power of Delphi, this book and then afterwards the Delphi Developers guide is an excellent choice. If you are in this situation and want to buy just one Delphi book however, I'd suggest Mastering Delphi 6.

If you are using Delphi 5 or 6, this book will not cover all its features. Don't expect it to. But if you want to get the basics of object oriented programming in Delphi and a good grounding in its basics, this is a great place to start.

Difficulty ratings:

Building Delphi 6 applications: Beginner - Intermediate
Mastering Delphi 6: Intelligent/Experienced beginner - advanced
Delphi Developers Guide 6: Intermediate -advanced

Pricing . . . this book is probably priced a bit high for what it is. It is competing by title, price and marketing with 1500 page tomes that cover everything. The publisher would be better of rebranding it into a new niche of making Delphi easy to learn, at which I think this book excels.

Potential . . . this book has a lot of potential to position itself as a great learning object pascal and Delphi book. I think it would gain greatly from adding more of the absolute basics like learning plain Pascal so it could be a one-stop learn from scratch resource, and it obviously needs to get up to date with Delphi 5 and 6, particularly with regard to databases (ADO/dbGo, dbExpress, Interbase express) but also CLX, datasnap, XML, and so on. I think if the next edition builds on the basics but adds a concise section on up to date and new features, and changes or reflects its title more, it can be a winner.

A note to Paul Kimmel (the author): you sure hit a lot of flack with the title! I can see where you're coming from - if you call it Building Delphi 5 applications and release it after Delphi 6 is released, you're not going to be on the best-seller list. I suggest renaming it "object-oriented RAD application development with Delphi versions 2-6". It gets the gist across of what the book is about.

Rating:
Summary: NOT Delphi 6
Review: I bought this book and I returned this book. With no mention of Biz Snap, Web Snap, etc., you feel very deceived. He should have waited another month or two and made it a real Delphi 6 book.

Rating:
Summary: Should have the "6" removed from the title...
Review: If you are a developer you should know that someday we have to make applications to many operative systems, like Linux, mac, win, etc; the advanage of knowing Delphi is that you can make an app for windows and if you want to to make an app for Linux you won't be obligated to learn another language, all you have to do is to make your program in Kylix, 'cause this tool is the delphi for Linux. You can't do it with vbasic 'cause visual basic doesn't exist for Linux (yet)

Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners
Review: Learning delphi is not very easy. If you are a beginner, buy this book along with "Programming & problem solving with delphi" and "Delphi in a nutshell" (a MUST language reference). Later you should buy "Mastering delphi X" and "Delphi X developers guide" (where X is the latest delphi version number).

Rating:
Summary: NOT Delphi 6 book
Review: NO WebSnap and Web Services technology expalined at all. It is OK for beginners but doesn't cover at all the cool new features of Delphi 6 Web technologies.

Rating:
Summary: Deceptive title, deceptive book
Review: Should be called Delphi 4 for dummies.
Does not even have ADO , which came out in Delphi 5.

And he dares to call it a book about Delphi 6 !

I returned my copy and used the refund to get Mastering Delphi 6.

Rating:
Summary: Who is this book for?
Review: The title off this book must be Delphi for Dummies, or beginners, there are not delphi 6 information like CLX full explanation, webSnap, DataSnap, XML components, and others new features.