Charlie Calvert's Delphi 4 Unleashed [With *]

by Charles Calvert

A complete high-end reference for programmers and developers in Borland's June 98 release of Delphi 4. Topics covered include: building and integrating components with Java and Active X; Internet and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672312859
• ISBN13: 9780672312854
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Sams
• Length: 1152 Pages
• Weight: 4.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.0" x 7.4" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book, extremely wide area covered in ample detail

You can see Charlie Calvert works at Inprise. His coverage of Delphi ver 4 is very wide and detailed. Although not always as techinical as the Mastering Delphi books this book is easy reading and probably one of the best buys for someone new to Delphi or someone who would like to really harness the power of this RAD tool. In a nutshell, this is a book written by a programmer, for programmers. Great going Charlie!

Not a reference, a wonderful book

OK, tell the truth now - how many computer books do you have on your bookshelf that you DON'T read? I mean perfectly good books that are for some reason almost perfectly useless? Charlie Calvert may not write the most spartan and pointed reference books, but he does offer carefully written prose that many enjoy reading, and hence will read. What is more useful? a detailed and encyclopedic reference, that tries to beat the on-line help and manuals (and whose index you search in vain twice a year), or something that you will *actually read*, savor, and might remember a bit of? The truth of the matter is that no single book on any programming environment can cover it all, but if you are a pretty hip Delphi user, and you know you don't know everything, you will enjoy a slow read of Calvert's book, a chapter here and there, with an iced tea in the shade this summer, and find out why Charlie is so well-liked. He comes across like the older programmer that will show you a trick or two about the craft. There are some down sides to this 1100 page tome. In almost all computer books these days, the index is ridiculously underpowered, say by a factor of 4 to 1, and Delphi 4 Unleashed is no exception. It's hard to understand why. Hey, if their indexes were better, some of the shelfware books might be useful, like looking up an example when you're desperate.The trend towards putting selected chapters only on the CD is unacceptable. The Adobe Acrobat reader is an ABYSMAL program, and all this defeats the purpose of having a book. I loved having a WHOLE book in BOTH paper and searchable Windows Help format, like Blaszczak's MFC book, but the paper/Acrobat hybrid is a loser. I don't care what they have to do, thinner paper, limiting the scope, but I DON'T WANT parts of my books missing from the book. I will never read these chapters, and I feel cheated.As things stand, be glad Calvert's stuff that you will read is a pleasure, and very valuable. And it is.

Authentic and Complete

This book has given the Unleashed series a new dimension. It is complete in coverage of topics and autentic in the details.

Great book!

Takes off where the newbie books end; except chp. 26, which is too low-level for this book. I started with the game programming stuff; now that DirectX 6.1 AND the JEDI-project are there, even an owner of Delphi4 standard (like myself) can tap into fantastic multimedia high-tech, at practically no cost. On p. 1086, Calvert says that he wants to write a book on game and multimedia development with Delphi. OK - I'm waiting!

This is a must have for any serious Delphi developer.

I am new to Delphi with less than 3 months of hands on Delphi experience, but I have over 10 years of programming experience. This book showed me all of the features I needed to accomplish my project tasks and then some. Chapters on the Internet, COM, COBRA were very well written and easy to read, but with rich content. I highly recommend this book to any serious Delphi programmer.