“Delphi XE2 Foundations” by Chris Rolliston

Don’t let the name of the book fool you. “Delphi XE2 Foundations” by Chris Rolliston could just as easily have been called “Delphi Foundations” and it would be just as true.

This book is much closer to the traditional programming books like the Mastering series, or Marco Cantu’s original books. It’s somewhere between a tutorial and a reference book. The writing style is great and I am more likely to reach for the book then look online for any topic that is covered in the book.

“Delphi XE2 Foundations” content

The reason why I say they should drop the “XE2” from the title is because the topics are really fundamental to Delphi. They include language basics, string handling, generics, arrays, basic I/O, streams, zip, xml and XML, RTTI, native APIs and multithreading.

While some of the topics are recent features (generics, RTTI etc), most of the book could apply to any version of Delphi.

And then what really set XE2 apart from XE1 is virtually not mentioned.

Firemonkey receives a passing mention. Which given how much Firemonkey has changed over the last 5 releases is probably a good thing. So this is NOT a Firemonkey book.

“Delphi XE2 Foundations” audience

So who is the book for? Novice Delphi programmers, hobbyists, and those upgrading from earlier versions. Experienced programmers would probably know a large amount of the material and would get more value out of online forums. Personally I thought it was great, which gives an insight into my level of competency.

So if the “Delphi Cookbook” is a sampler, and “Coding in Delphi” is a main course, then “Delphi XE2 Foundations” would have to be the cheese sandwich – it’s the day to day staple diet stuff.

Now I just have to find a book to qualify as the dessert.