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Building Delphi 6 Applications
by Paul Kimmel

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional Book Group  Buy it Now!
ISBN: 0072129956
Format: Paperback, 774pp.

Here comes the book review for the Delphi 6 book with no Delphi 6 yet available?!

Building Delphi 6 Applications was written for novice to intermediate Delphi developers who want to sharpen their Delphi programming knowledge. The book is also very interesting for professional programmers whishing to cross over from other Windows (RAD) environment.

Having a book on Delphi 6 published now is somehow weird. The product is still in development, and the book might be inaccurate if it covers anything that's new in Delphi 6. In fact, the book introduces several components new to Delphi 6. For example, the new TValueListEditor and TRecall are poorly documented and the reader can't learn to much from the book.

Let's see what we can find in the book from the point of Delphi 5 (<) developer. Building Delphi 6 Applications is divided into 19 chapters (~800 pages) that will let you discover Object Pascal in depth, how to write your own VCL extensions, how to do database programming with Delphi and more. Chapter 18, for example, sums all the information the book introduces in the first seventeen chapters in order to demonstrate the building (and deploying) process of a Rich Edit text editor, implemented using the MDI specifications.

The chapter entitled "Using Microsoft Automation Component", brings closer an important part of COM Automation - MS Access is used for parsing fixed-length data. The "Internet Programming" part of the book, covers the usage of the new Internet Direct components from Nevrona while showing how to build a solid FTP client. Another chapter provides an overview of HTML and the set of VCL tools that help you build Web server application - the WebBroker.

More than 140 pages of the book are reserved for database programming with Delphi. Topics like using the Data Access and Data Control components as well as SQL and MIDAS programming are covered. However, the ADO programming model is left from the book.

Appendix A demonstrates how to create component editors and how to extend Delphi itself with the OpenTools API. Appendix B discusses the basic concepts of building Windows NT service Applications by demonstrating an automated IIS log file mailer. Appendix C shows how to convert an application into an automation server and appendix D demonstrates that Delphi can handily help you build dynamic Web solutions for wireless devices.

The CD that comes with the book includes all of the code from the book, sample application section including a WAP application. You will also find components, component and property editors, Delphi experts and dozen of practical exercises and examples of all kinds of code.

Please do not buy this book if you are looking for any new information on what is to come from the upcoming Delphi 6 release. There is not even one reference to the new CLX libraries that we all know (?) will be in Delphi 6. On the other hand, no book or product is perfect and I am not suggesting that you should avoid this book. I'd like to state that Building Delphi 6 Applications has enough good stuff (usable with any Delphi version) in it to hang around for awhile.