Preface

If you've been a software developer for a long time, you certainly know how useful a conversation can be with a colleague who has already done something similar to what you are doing and can explain it, as they faced the same problem. It is not possible to put all the possible situations that a developer can face in a book, but many problems are similar at least in principle. This is the reason this book is organized as a cookbook: just like a combination of foods can be adapted and modified to be appropriate for different types of dinner, a "programming recipe" can provide the idea to solve many different problems.

This book is an advanced level guide that will help Delphi developers get a higher expertise in their everyday job. The everyday job, and the quality of your deliverables, is what contributes to the quality of your professional life. If it does not make sense, reinvent the wheel repeatedly, especially when working with a well-established tool, such as Delphi. The focus of the book is to provide readers with comprehensive and detailed examples on how effectively the Delphi software can be designed and written. All the recipes in the book are the result of years of development, training, and consultancy activities in many different fields of the IT industries, from the small systems with thousands of installations to the large systems commissioned by big companies or by the government. It is not a magic book that will solve all your development problems (if you find it, tell me, please!), but can be helpful to get a different point of view on a specific problem, or a hint on how to solve problems.

Armed with the knowledge of advanced concepts, such as high order functions and anonymous methods, generics and enumerable, extended RTTI and duck typing, LiveBindings, multi-threading, FireMonkey, mobile development, server-side development, and so on, you will be pleasantly surprised as to how quickly and easily you can use Delphi to write high quality, clean, readable, fast, maintainable, and extensible code.

I read too many boring programming books, so I tried to maintain a relaxed and light exposition. A small applicability scenario that describes a situation where a particular technology, approach, or design pattern can be used successfully introduces all the recipes. The recipes are not too complex, because otherwise the book may become thousands of pages long, but also not trivial because the IT books' landscape is already full of simple examples with few direct applicability. I tried to do a good tradeoff and I hope to be able to do it.

Every time I start to read a new book, I ask myself, "Will the author have something interesting to say?", "How much will this book change my point of view about the topics mentioned?", "Is it worth the time spent to read it?" Now, in spite of being from the other side of the river, I worked hard to put as much good quality contents in my books as possible, I hope that will match your expectations.

One last note. Writing hundreds of pages about advanced programming is not an easy task. However, I am very pleased to have done it and I hope you will enjoy reading it at least how I enjoyed writing it.