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This is a vast tome at nearly 1100 pages, which together with the range of topics covered, helps to justify the fairly high price. The authors have managed, however, to reduce the load from the previous edition of the book for C++Builder 5. This was a similar length, but had almost as much additional text on its accompanying CD. Just in case any important topics were cut, the full texts of both this volume and the previous edition are included on the CD accompanying this book.

This guide sets out to cover a broad range of topics in sufficient detail to get you started. For example, it covers: the basic Builder IDE, the VCL GUI library, COM, XML, database connectivity, a range of graphics and multimedia technologies etc. It is very successful in providing a reasonable level of information to get users started, both with potentially unfamiliar technologies, and with using these within Builder.

Although I have not used this version of the book extensively as yet, I have used previous versions and have never found any significant errors. All in all, this book is recommended to most Builder users, whether highly experienced or newcomers. The only note of caution is that if you require an in depth discussion of a particular technology with respect to Builder, this book probably won't serve all your needs, but nonetheless, should get you started.