Starting from today my Delphi Cookbook 2nd edition is available to buy. The first edition got a lot of interest and appreciation comments. Delphi Cookbook is a best sellers for PacktPub (my editor) in its category, the editor decided to ask me a 2nd edition. So here it is!

What’s new

The problem with each “2nd” edition is: “What I can expect if I already bought the 1st one?”. This edition contains all the recipes from the 1st edition updated to the new Delphi 10.1 Berlin, plus a lot (ca 150 pages) of brand new contents. There is also a brand new chapter about less-known RTL classes. Also some “old” recipes has been completely rewritten because some techniques has been superseded by the newer Delphi versions. So, if you liked the 1st edition, you should find something interesting also in the 2nd one. The 2nd edition contains 470 pages compared to the 328 of the 1st edition.

Topics of the book

Understand the basics of professionals Delphi programming

Become a Delphi language Ninja

Knowing the new RTL classes to work with HTTP/S, Net encodings, event bus, compression etc.

Develop visually stunning applications using FireMonkey

Deploy LiveBinding effectively with the right OOP approach

The thousand faces of multithreading: syncronization tecniques in the real world

The Parallel Programming Library: Tasks, Futures parallel For

Create server-side programs to serve RESTful web services and provide data to your mobile apps

Use well-defined GUI design patterns to build mobile applications that provide a great user experience

Build mobile apps that read data from a remote server efficiently

Using sensors and network in mobile apps

Call the platform native API on Android and iOS even for an unpublished API

Manage software customization for your customer by making better use of an extended RTTI

Implement the most popular design pattern without wasting too much time on debugging and bug fixing

Some considerations

Delphi Cookbook 2nd edition, just like to 1st one, it is not an introductory book, you will not find any “Introduction to the Object Pascal language”, however the majority of the chapters are not too complex and can be grasped also by the new Delphi programmers.

Where to buy

The book is available for sale on the editor website and on Amazon.

PacktPub (Official book page)

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

Amazon

Delphi Cookbook 2nd Edition on Amazon

Table of contents

Chapter 1: DELPHI BASICS

Change your application look&feel with VCL styles and no code

Changing the style of your application at run time

Customizing TDBGrid

Using owner draw combos and listboxes

How to make an owner draw control aware of the VCL styles

Creating a stack of embedded forms

Manipulating JSON

Manipulating and transform XML documents

I/O in the 21th century: knowing the streams

Creating a Windows service

Associating a file extension with your application on Windows

Be coerent with the Windows look&feel using TTaskDialog

Chapter 2: BECOME A DELPHI LANGUAGE NINJA

Fun with anonimous methods – using higher-Order functions

Writing enumerable types

RTTI to the rescue – configuring your class at runtime

Duck typing using RTTI

Creating helpers for your classes

Chapter 3: KNOWING YOUR FRIENDS: THE DELPHI RTL

Check strings with regular expressions

Consuming RESTful services using native HTTP(S) client libraries

Cope with the encoded Internet world using System.NetEncodings

Save space using System.Zip

Decouple your code using a cross platform publish/subscribe mechanism

Chapter 4: GOING CROSS PLATFORM WITH FIREMONKEY

Giving a new appearance to the standard FireMonkey controls using styles

Creating a styled TListBox

Impressing your clients with animations

Using master/details with LiveBindings

Showing complex vector shapes using Paths

Using Firemonkey in a VCL application

Reinvent your GUI a.k.a Mastering Firemonkey controls, shapes and effects

Chapter 5: THE THOUSAND FACES OF MULTITHREADING

Synchronizing shared resources with TMonitor

Talking with main thread using a thread safe queue

Synchronizing multiple threads using TEvent

Displaying a measure on 2D graph like an oscilloscope

Using the Parallel Programming Library in the real world: Tasks

Using the Parallel Programming Library in the real world: Futures

Using the Parallel Programming Library in the real world: Parallel For/Join

Chapter 6: PUT DELPHI ON THE SERVER

Developing web client JavaScript applications with WebBroker on the server

Converting a console service application to Windows service

Serializing a dataset to JSON and back

Serializing objects to JSON and back using RTTI

Sending a POST HTTP request encoding parameters

Implementing a RESTful interface using WebBroker

Controlling remote application using UDP

Using AppTethering to create companion app

Creating DataSnap Apache modules

Creating WebBroker Apache modules

Using native HTTP(S) client libraries

Chapter 7: RIDE THE MOBILE REVOLUTION WITH FIREMONKEY

Taking a photo, applying effects, and sharing it

Using ListView to show and search local data

Using SQLite databases to handle a to-do list

Do not block the main thread!

Using a styled TListView to handle long list of data

Customizing the TListView

Taking a photo and location and sending it to a server continuously

Talking with the backend

Making a phone call from your app!

Tracking the application’s lifecycle

Chapter 8: USING SPECIFIC PLATFORM FEATURES

Using Android SDK Java classes

Using iOS SDK classes

Displaying PDF files in your app

Sending Android intents

Letting your phone talk: using the Android TextToSpeech engine

Using Java classes in Android apps with Java2OP

Do it in background, the right way: Android services

Events

In the next months there will be some events regarding the book.

A one day workshop, held in Rome and Milan, about selected recipes of the books with additional contents and other “live” considerations. Some blog post about contents that not fitted (by time and other contraints) in the book. Most of them will be about the server side development and will involve Redis and other open source projects. Oct 6,7 2016 PacktPub will be one of the sponsor of ITDevCon 2016. During that event there will be some surprises for the attendants offered by the Delphi Cookbook “series” (yes, 2 is a series 🙂 ) editor.

Conclusions

As usual, writing a tech book is an hard task. 470 pages are more than I was thinking at the day 0. However, I’m quite (not completely, as usual) satisfied about the work. I really hope that you will enjoy the content at least as much I enjoy the writing.