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Delphi is Borland's rapid application development environment based on Object Pascal for Windows 95/NT. It suffers from the same problem as all large environments - one has difficulty navigating around it and finding the particular objects and methods required to solve the problem at hand. This (very large) text is a catalogue of the Delphi application framework, the Visual Component Library or VCL.

The book is in six parts with the first a very short overview. Parts 2 and 3 deal with objects (

TObject

and its descendants) and persistent objects (

TPersistent

, etc.) Part 4 describes components and how attributes are inherited from

TComponent

. Parts 5 and 6 complete the volume, dealing with Non-windowed and Windowed controls. Throughout the text each object, method, etc. is specified in detail with a note of its function, declaration, a description, objects affected, etc. plus an example of use (varying in length from a couple of lines to a small program of ten, twenty or thirty lines). The CD contains all the sample code and other examples plus a copy of WebHub, a Delphi web-server utility (not Delphi though - you will have to buy that!)

On-line help systems are OK for casual use but I find references such as this essential when developing large scale software using complex environments (Java is another example!) I loaned this text to one of my colleagues who is using Delphi as a front end to a graphical database of DNA fingerprints. He found it very useful, clarifying many subtle points and was most unhappy when I took it back.

This book is not suitable as a student text or for learners to teach themselves Delphi (and it is not intended as such). I would recommend it as a reference for professional programmers using Delphi in a real world development environment.