Understanding the Basics of Delphi Programming

Beginner developers eager to master the Delphi programming language should already be familiar with the basics of Microsoft Windows. Learning Delphi is easiest if you approach it from a guided, tutorial-based frame of reference. 

Foundational Concepts

Get started with a history lesson covering the evolution of (Turbo) Pascal to Delphi 2005, such that Delphi evolved into a rapid-application-deployment framework intended to offer high-performance, scalable applications for online and mobile delivery.

After that, explore the meat-and-potatoes of what Delphi actually is and how to install and configure its development environment. From there, explore the main parts and tools of the Delphi IDE.

"Hello, World!"

Begin your overview of application development with Delphi by creating a simple project, writing code, compiling, and running a project. Then learn about properties, events, and Delphi Pascal by creating your second simple Delphi application — allowing you to learn how to place components on a form, set their properties, and write event-handler procedures to make components cooperate.

Delphi Pascal

Before you start developing more sophisticated applications by using the RAD features of Delphi, you should learn the basics of the Delphi Pascal language. At this point, you'll need to start thinking carefully about code maintenance, including code commenting, and how to cleaning your Delphi code errors — a discussion on Delphi design, run and compile time errors and how to prevent them. Also, take a look at some solutions to most common logic errors.

Forms and Databases

In just about every Delphi application, we use forms to present and retrieve information from users. Delphi arms us with a rich array of visual tools for creating forms and determining their properties and behavior. We can set them up at design time using the property editors and we can write code to re-set them dynamically at runtime. Look at simple SDI forms and consider some good reasons for not letting your program auto-create forms.

Delphi Personal edition does not offer database support, but you can create your own flat database to store any kind of data — all without a single data-aware component.

Managing Your Work

While you're developing a large Delphi application, as your program becomes more complex, its source code can become hard to maintain. Create your own code modules — Delphi code files that contain logically associated functions and procedures. Along the way you should explore Delphi's built-in routines and how to make all the units of a Delphi application cooperate.

The Delphi IDE (the code editor) helps you effectively jump from a method implementation and a method declaration, locate a variable declaration using tooltip symbol insight features, and more.