John Kouraklis - Delphi Quick Syntax Reference: A Pocket Guide to the Delphi and Object Pascal Language

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484261118 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Delphi is a modern general-purpose programming language which enhances and supersedes Object Pascal. It is in the market for more than two decades now, and it is used in a wide range of applications. The language is maintained by Embarcadero and is backed by a large community of developers.

The language is versatile, it supports different programming paradigms, and it exhibits quick learning curve. It is easy to grasp the main and fundamental concepts and start coding straightaway. Naturally, as in every language, there is complexity down the line especially when advanced libraries are utilized.

This book offers a guide to the fundamentals. It takes people with no knowledge of the language all the way to what they need to know to start their journey in Delphi. By the end of this book, you will have enough knowledge to be able to read articles about Delphi and understand code of intermediate complexity. In short, this book offers a fast-track induction course to the language.

The typical reader of this book is the newcomer to Delphi with basic knowledge of computer programming. The book offers all the necessary knowledge to get you started with Delphi and provides a wide range of references to allow you expand your knowledge.

Although the newcomer is in the center of this book, the experienced developer will benefit every time they are unsure or need a refresher on topics around the fundamentals of the language.

I use the Professional edition, but there is nothing I do that exploits any features specific to this edition. The code can be tested using even the free Community Edition of Delphi. In fact, most of the code can be executed in other editions of Object Pascal.

There are some topics that utilize features found in specific versions of Delphi. Whenever this happens, I clearly flag the topics.

The book has five chapters. It starts with basic syntactical elements of the language and gradually introduces how core concepts of modern programming are managed in Delphi. Each chapter is independent to previous chapters, which means you can start reading the most suitable subject to your situation.

This chapter looks at Delphi as a programming language. It discusses the syntax and structure of the code, and it introduces the basic development workflow Delphi developers follow.

The second chapter provides the fundamental knowledge a newcomer needs to get an understanding of how basic concepts in programming work in Delphi. Variables, data types, and generics are introduced.

Managing the execution flow of code in Delphi is the topic of this chapter. Common structures like loops, conditional statements, and code jumps are covered to provide to the reader different ways to control logic in code.

In this chapter, we move to modular programming. We visit procedures and functions and investigate the way they are implemented and used in Delphi.

OOP is one of the most fundamental and widespread paradigms in modern software development. In this chapter, we look at how OOP is done in Delphi and expand the discussion to cover interfaces, another core concept of contemporary programming.

This book includes source code files that can be accessed via the Download Source Code link located at www.apress.com/9781484261118 . The projects are named after the number of the chapter ( ChapterXX ) they refer to. There is also a dedicated project group which loads all the projects for all chapters. You can find it under the name DelphiQuickReference.groupproj .