Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition

[DP News-Robot]

On the day of Delphi 30th anniversary, I'm making available at first partial version of Mastering Delphi 5, with annotations and some new images taken in Delphi 12.*



The Book Web Page

I created a new page on my web site to host the book download:* www.marcocantu.com/md52025/ . The free PDF is linked from that page as a direct URL. The current version has 6 chapters and 300 pages. I plan to continue working on in and release udaptes in the coming weeks.

Preface to the 2025 Commented Edition

As you know I wrote several Mastering Delphi books over the course of the years. I thoughts a few times about writing a new one... but the task is fairly daunting, given Delphi (as an IDE and considering the libraries and target platforms it now supports) has dramatically grown in size and complexity, and you'd now need several thousand pages to cover the product adequately, and not even in depth. While I have several draft of my older books, it turns out Mastering Delphi 5 is the oldest one I have in an electronic version with images and proper formatting. A few years back, I acquired the rights of this edition from my original publisher (Sybex, now part of Wiley) and considering a new edition I asked a person to reformat the text, import the images, and turn this into a complete volume.

That was a few years back. More recently, I found this edited and formatted manuscript, and decided to make it public rather than keeping it on my hard drive. The text of the book is, with minor and limited changes, the original text covering version 5 of Delphi, released in 1999.


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This is not a book on recent versions of Delphi: A few of the sections are clearly dated, but most of the core content covering the key features of the product is still actual today. However, publishing it as is would have been of very limited use and possibly confusing. Therefore I've made two primary changes to the book. First I've captured some updated images of the IDE and of the running applications. I've kept some of the original images alongside, though, mixing the old and the new. The different is so striking I don't even need to call them out. Second I've added a large number of footnotes to underline new features, significant changes, code I'd write differently, assertions that are no longer true. I haven't rewritten the text, as this would have been way more time consuming, but I've pointed out many facts, giving ideas and suggestions for further study, or just providing some tidbits and facts, along with many links to additional information available online. I've used footnotes to reduce the impact on the existing text, compared to adding notes in the text flow or doing direct edits.

But you might still wonder, who is this book for? Although it might appeal them, this is not only for the nostalgic, although some of the old timers might find it interesting to read it. It is for anyone who wants to understand Delphi. Even covering the product how it was many years ago, this book helps understanding all of Delphi's core concepts.

You might be wondering if this is possible because Delphi is an old product. This is certainly not the case. It underlines the fact the product has a great history, but also that it has kept and keeps evolving in a fantastic way while maintaining its core tenets and offering an unparalleled degree of compatibility in the development tools space. The fact that most of the code in this old book can be compiled and run today, producing modern looking Windows 11 applications is a testament of the power of Delphi.

This preface is the only new section of the book. From now on, this is the old book with my comments and annotation. Have a good reading!



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