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.
Chapter 1, Delphi Basics, talks about a set of general approaches that should not be ignored by any Delphi programmer. Some topics are simple and immediate and some are not but all of them should be well understood. By the end of this chapter, the reader is able to use some of the fundamental Delphi techniques related to the RTL, to the VCL, and to the OS integration.
Chapter 2, Becoming a Delphi Language Ninja, focuses on the Object Pascal language. The programming language is the way you talk to the machine, so you must be fluent and know all the possibilities offered. This chapter talks about higher-order functions, practical utilization of the extended RTTI, regular expressions, and other things useful to augment the power of your code and to lower the amount of time spent on debugging.
Chapter 3, Knowing Your Friends – the Delphi RTL, focuses on the Delphi' RTL. There isn't a detailed description of all the Delphi's RTLs (you would need 10 books like this one, which will be particularly boring, I guess) but you can find some recipes that explain some of the most important RTL features and some less know but really useful classes. You'll learn how to use regular expressions, the most popular encoding format used by HTTP base applications, and how to use the built-in data de/compression-related classes.
Chapter 4, Going Cross-Platform with FireMonkey, is dedicated to the FireMonkey framework in general. What you will learn from this chapter can be used in many of the platforms that FireMonkey supports. Moreover, you will learn about non-trivial LiveBindings utilizations.
Chapter 5, The Thousand Faces of Multithreading, talks about thread synchronization and the mechanisms used to obtain this synchronization, such as TMonitor, thread-safe queues, and TEvent. It is also one of the most complex chapters. By the end of this chapter, the reader will be able to create and communicate with background threads, leaving your main thread free to update your GUI (or to communicate with the OS).
Chapter 6, Putting Delphi on the Server, focuses on how well Delphi can behave when running on a server. Some people think that Delphi is a client-only tool, but it is not true. In this chapter, we'll show how to create powerful servers that offer services over a network. Then, in some recipe, we'll also implement a JavaScript client that brings the database data into the user browser. Techniques explained in this chapter open a range of possibilities, especially in the mobile and web area.
Chapter 7, Riding the Mobile Revolution with FireMonkey, is dedicated to the mobile development with Delphi and FireMonkey. If you are interested in mobile development, I think that will be your favorite chapter! Mobile is everywhere, and this chapter will explain how to write software for your Android or iOS device, what are the best practices to use, how to save your data on the mobile, how to retrieve and update remote data, and how to integrate with the mobile operating system.
Chapter 8, Using Specific Platform Features, shows you how to integrate your app with the underlying mobile operating systems beyond what FireMonkey offers. You will learn how to import Java and Objective C libraries in your app and how to use the SDK classes from your Object Pascal code.
This book talks about Delphi, so you need it. Not all the recipes are available in all the Delphi editions. Typically, the mobile projects can be compiled only if you have Delphi Enterprise or higher (or Delphi Professional plus the mobile add-on, or RAD Studio professional or higher). All the projects are compiled and tested with the latest Delphi version at the time of writing, but many recipes can be compiled also on older versions.
If you want to run the mobile app on a phone or a tablet, you could use the Android emulator or the iOS simulator, but we strongly suggest an actual device to see how the app really behaves. To deploy an iOS app on your device, you also need an Apple computer with MacOSX.
This book aims to help the professional Delphi developers in their day-to-day job. This book will teach you about the newest Delphi technologies and its hidden gems. It is not a book for a newbie, but the practical approach will help you reach a new level with your Delphi skills. The experienced developer can benefit from this book because nontrivial problems are solved using best practices. Where more than one way is available or the topic is too broad to be explained in the available pages, references are provided to allow you to go deeper in that field. It is a book to have on your desk for the next few years.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Style manipulation at runtime is done using the class methods of the TStyleManager class."
A block of code is set as follows:
procedure TMainForm.StylesListRefresh; var stylename: string; begin ListBox1.Clear; // retrieve all the styles linked in the executable for stylename in TStyleManager.StyleNames do begin ListBox1.Items.Add(stylename); end; end;
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
begin
Application.Initialize;
Application.MainFormOnTaskbar := True;
TStyleManager.TrySetStyle('Iceberg Classico');
Application.CreateForm(TMainForm, MainForm);
Application.Run;
endAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Add all the columns to TDBGrid by right-clicking and selecting Columns Editor".
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