Preface

A favorite author once penned, "Resistance to change leads to catastrophic change." I fully believe that and, in this field, learning and growing and yes, changing, is good—anything else is career death.

Delphi has been around for over 25 years, but it is anything but old. The language, libraries, and toolset are not stagnant and applications built with this suite of compilers rival those of competing products. Continual updates, frequent webinars, lively forum debates, a recent explosion of books, and a myriad of blog sites are evidence of a rich and active developer community.

This book takes you on a journey. This journey will build upon and extend the hours you've invested in creating beautiful desktop applications and teach you how to craft new, globally usable mobile apps and backend servers that power today's interconnected platforms. Technology has exploded with ways to communicate and share data between apps, web services, and devices of all kinds. People demand choices—choice of operating system, choice of style, choice of screen size, and choice of location.

Companies everywhere have risen to the challenge of providing options to satisfy these customer demands with unique tools that market to a new generation of developers. Are you feeling left behind, wondering how to move forward?

Reading this book will expand your Delphi programming skill set in a step-by-step manner, explaining what you need to know to handle the variety of challenges addressing new platforms will bring. And we'll have fun along the way. We'll build database applications that have sample data built in to make prototyping easier than ever. We'll build a 3D game you can play on your smartphone. We'll create a full-featured mobile app you can extend for your own creative uses. We'll also build powerful backend REST servers with virtually no code.

Take this journey with me to multiple platforms—fearlessly!