Friday 28 February 2020

The Little Book Of Delphi Programming (Object Pascal)

I’ve been programming in Delphi for over 25 years. What? Can that really be true? It doesn’t seem that long but Delphi’s just had its 25th birthday so it really must be. It was launched in 1995 and I was using the pre-release beta some months before that. I wrote the review of Delphi for PC Plus Magazine and for more than ten years after that I wrote the monthly Delphi programming columns for the same magazine.

Delphi was the successor to Borland’s hugely successful DOS-based Turbo Pascal and its less successful Windows Pascal (even I can hardly remember that – I think it was called ‘Borland Pascal With Objects’ or something equally unmemorable). At the time, Delphi was, in my view, far the best visual (drag-and-drop, design-and-code) environment for Windows. Its only real competition was Microsoft’s Visual Basic. The trouble is that no matter how visual you make Basic, it’s still Basic. Whereas Delphi used a very nice version of Pascal that had a reasonably modular unit-based system, good Object Orientation and also had low-level features for anyone who might be missing C.

Anyway, Delphi is still going strong. It’s owned by Embarcadero these days and you can get a free copy here: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download


To celebrate Delphi’s 25th birthday, I’ve just released a book for new or intermediate Delphi programmers. It’s called The Little Book Of Delphi and it’s available in paperback or as a Kindle eBook from Amazon.

The book covers:

  • Fundamentals of Delphi
  • The Object Pascal language 
  • Object Orientation
  • Variables, Types, Constants
  • Operators and Tests
  • for loops and while loops
  • Procedures and Functions 
  • Parameters and Arguments
  • Arrays and Lists
  • String Operations
  • Case Statements
  • User-defined Types
  • Constructors and Methods
  • Creating and Freeing Objects
  • Inheritance and Encapsulation
  • Virtual and Overridden Methods
  • File-handling
  • Text files and Binary files
  • Streaming and Serialization
  • Errors and Exceptions
  • ...and much more

Here are the links:

Amazon (US)
Paperback: https://amzn.to/37ZJqHF
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0854D12GJ

Amazon (UK)
Paperback: https://amzn.to/392AJxm
eBook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0854D12GJ

Tuesday 25 February 2020

Download Classic Adventurer Magazine FREE

There’s an interview with me (Huw Collingbourne) in the latest edition of the Classic Adventurer Magazine (#8) which you can download free here: http://classicadventurer.co.uk/ 


In the interview, I discuss everything from The Golden Wombat Of Destiny – the game I wrote back in the '80s – to my recent book, The Little Book Of Adventure Game Programming. There are numerous other articles in the magazine that should be of interest to anyone interested in retro/classic ‘Interactive Fiction’ games.

Monday 24 February 2020

Ruby Programming - Instance Variables

What the heck is an 'instance' and why does it have its own variables? My latest YouTube video for Ruby programmers explains all...