Hi Everyone

I am just putting together an order for abebooks. They have a million and one Pascal books. I can't decide on which ones to buy.

Could you let me know what your favourite Pascal books are? -Patrick

----- Original Message -----

The best introductory Turbo Pascal book I've ever read was "Mastering Turbo Pascal 6" from Scott D. Palmer spanish edition, I remember how amazed I was after learning how pointers work, and how fast my apps became after replacing arrays by linked lists, etc. Of course this is a very old book, focused mostly on procedural programming (it has a couple of oop chapter, though).

http://www.urbe.edu/UDWLibrary/InfoBook.do?id=1989

Another great book I've read was "Mastering Delphi" 5 and 6 from Marco Cantú, they covered every detail of Delphi, from UI, to Services, and also OOP.

http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Delphi-6/dp/0782128742

Apart from those, I recommend reading not so Pascal specific books, but application design in general, like "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" from Martin Fowler.

http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Enterprise-Application-Architecture-Martin/dp/0321127420/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358855453&sr=1-1&keywords=design+patterns+martin  
Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

Once upon a time, on 01/21/2013 07:51 PM to be precise, Patrick said:

For the beginning programmer:

http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-Delphi-Days/dp/0672312867/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358859138&sr=1-1&keywords=delphi+4+21

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

The best introductory Turbo Pascal book I've ever read was "Mastering Turbo Pascal 6" from Scott D. Palmer spanish edition, I remember how amazed I was after learning how pointers work, and how fast my apps became after replacing arrays by linked lists, etc. Of course this is a very old book, focused mostly on procedural programming (it has a couple of oop chapter, though).

Yeah, that was a good book.

Apart from those, I recommend reading not so Pascal specific books, but application design in general, like "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" from Martin Fowler.

Very good advice! I would simply learn the syntax. So read the Delphi or FPC Language Reference Guides. Once you have the basics, start writing code - that is the best way to learn.

The "Test Driven Development" book by Kent Beck (great book) had a brilliant idea. If Kent wanted to learn a new language, he tried to implement a Unit Testing framework. By the time he had a usable testing framework, he knew pretty much everything the language had to offer.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Test-Driven-Development-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/0321146530

Regards,
- Graeme -

Thanks to Leonardo, Ewald and Graeme

I am off to a great start-Patrick

Leonardo M. Ramé wrote

The best introductory Turbo Pascal book I've ever read was "Mastering Turbo Pascal 6" from Scott D. Palmer spanish edition,

i've got one with that very same title but written by Tom Swan... the one i have is the paperback, fourth edition - third printing 1993... 1037 pages...

ISBN: 0-672-48505-2
LCCCN: 91-61702

Has anybody mentioned "Lazarus: The Complete Guide" yet?

http://www.blaisepascal.eu/index.php?actie=./subscribers/UK_Book_Department

I don't have a copy, but I think that the cross-platform aspect of Free Pascal and Lazarus means that one has at least to be aware that some facets of TP and Delphi don't apply.

Also both Delphi/Lazarus and the underlying Object Pascal language have moved so much towards a component-based approach that things like linked list manipulation are far less important than they used to be. Arguably, if you find yourself with a pointer or an address at the application level then you're at fault: everything like that should be in custom objects with well-defined interfaces.

Hi Patrick,

I am just putting together an order for abebooks. They have a million and one Pascal books. I can't decide on which ones to buy.

I also forgot to mention in my previous post, there are some more sources of information.

I have some e-books in INF format. They came from the Sybil Library. Sibyl was a Delphi-clone, much like FPC & Lazarus, but for the OS/2 and later the Windows platforms. The company later closed down, but open sourced much of their work.

Anyway, the one ebook [tutorial.inf] has 10 chapters covering the Object Pascal language in a nice friendly manner. Easy to follow. There are some references to Sybil or OS/2, but the information about the language is sound, and using FPC you should be able to follow the examples without problems.

The second ebook [oop_refg.inf] covers Object Oriented Programming using Object Pascal. Unfortunately this book is only available in German - I have plans to translate it to English soon.

To view the books you need an INF viewer. You can download fpGUI's Docview binary for Windows or Linux from SourceForge [http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpgui/files/fpGUI/0.8/], or you can compile the latest version of DocView from the fpGUI repository. DocView is a small stand-alone application (450KB download) - no installation or 3rd party libraries are required.

Some INF e-books are available at:

http://opensoft.homeip.net/~graemeg/inf_books/

Regards,
- Graeme -

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

The second ebook [oop_refg.inf] covers Object Oriented Programming using Object Pascal. Unfortunately this book is only available in German - I have plans to translate it to English soon.

Interesting. Together with motaz' Lazarus book (see thread on Laz list) perhaps we could end up with an open source, collaborative effort that mirrors Marco Cantu's Essential Pascal & Essential Delphi... (Yep, I'm sometimes still an optimistic dreamer)