All the Delphi books you need to improve your programming skills

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As a developer, you can always improve yourself, acquire skills, learn to program better. This can be done simply by programming more (and thus learning from the mistakes you make), but if you really want to get a push, you can best make use of the knowledge of others. That’s why at GDK Software we have a policy that you can always buy books at the expense of the company. You’ll earn this investment back in no time.

At GDK Software we work with Delphi. For the Delphi developers among us, I have listed some good books to expand your (Delphi) knowledge.

I’m sure you can pick something up from the next list of books. Most are aimed specifically at Delphi programmers, but I added two books that are generally very useful to read.

We start with the ‘base’, if you don’t know much about Delphi or Pascal this one is highly recommended.

Object Pascal Handbook by Marco Cantu

Marco Cantu is the best-selling Delphi books author and Delphi Senior Product Manager. He has already written many books about Delphi, but with this updated version you have a complete manual of all the ins-and-outs of the programming language Object Pascal. Highly recommended if you want to start programming in Delphi. The book covers the basics, from elementary console applications to complex code structures.

And as a bonus, Marco added “The Evolution of Object Pascal” in the appendix as well.

Coding in Delphi and More Coding in Delphi by Nick Hodges

To describe these books it is best to give the floor to the author himself:

“The one thing that I notice is that there are a lot more of you Delphi guys than the average Delphi guy thinks. There are Delphi folks everywhere. Also, I have noticed that a lot of Delphi developers are “behind”. That is, they are either using an older version of Delphi, or they aren’t using or aren’t even aware of all the features in the newer versions of Delphi that they are using. If the above is familiar, this book is for you: The Delphi developer that hasn’t quite yet made the leap over into the cool and amazing things that you can do with the latest versions of the Delphi language.”

Need I say more?

https://leanpub.com/codingindelphi and
https://leanpub.com/morecodingindelphi

Delphi Cookbook by Daniele Teti

This book aims to help professional Delphi developers in their day-to-day jobs and consists of about 50 Delphi programming recipes. The book covers topics such as manipulation JSON, anonymous methods, multithreading and Firemonkey stuff. Including the code recipes found at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Delphi-Cookbook-Third-Edition it’s useful to have a look at the examples.

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/delphi-cookbook-third-edition

Dependency Injection by Nick Hodges

This book covers Dependency Injection from A to Z. In it, you’ll learn about Constructor Injection, Property Injection, and Method Injection. You’ll learn about the right and wrong way to use the Dependency Injection Container.

And why do you need Dependency Injection? Just read the book and you know why!

https://leanpub.com/dependencyinjectionindelphi

Expert Delphi by Paweł Głowacki

This book by Paweł (who sadly passed away in 2017) focusses on mobile development with Delphi. Although the book is several years old, it is still valuable to read if you want to get started with mobile applications. Via Packtpub you can read the book for free as well:

https://www.packtpub.com/free-ebooks/application-development/expert-delphi/9781786460165

Delphi in Depth: FireDAC by Cary Jensen

If you work a lot with databases (and who doesn’t) then this book is for you. The book describes how to get optimal performance from your database and the connection to databases, how to work with cached updates, FireDAC scalar functions and so on.

https://sites.fastspring.com/jensendatasystems/product/delphiindepthfiredac

And finally, two books I really appreciate. Both are not specific to Delphi but are very useful and fun to read.

Clean code by Robert C. Martin

The subtitle of this book is “A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship”. A book every software developer should have read.
“Even bad code can work. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development team to its knees. Every year, countless hours and considerable resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn’t have to be.” Recommended reading!

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/clean-code/9780136083238/ and https://cleancoders.com/

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Not a hands-on book as such, but a great book to clarify exactly how your code is executed ‘underwater’. Starting with the working of a telegraph pole, a complete working computer is thought out on paper. Very interesting to read, with appealing examples.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/code-charles-petzold/1100324884