Buying DelphiTM
USA residents - if you're a student,
teacher, or school
employee, you can usually purchase the current academic version for $100 or so from most college bookstores
from several online retailers of academic software (but
you can't sell the software you develop).
If you're not a student, or you have dreams of marketing your
software, check the "where to
buy" page or check at www.provantage.com
, a reliable authorized reseller with good prices.
Foreign residents
- check here
for "where to buy" links by country. Students
- look for Education links on the individual country home
pages. I have heard that Borland has distributed Delphi CDs with
various technical magazines from time to time, but haven't had any
first hand experience with this.
First Steps
If you're new to Delphi, it takes some extra effort to get started. For the first few hours, your learning
curve will be high. If you can find a class or mentor to help
you get started, that's great. If not, don't give up. We're
here to make sure you get the help you need.
The links listed below will
help you get started.
Tutorials
I haven't tried all of these tutorial programs -
use the feedback to let me know how good they are. Note: all
links to another site will open in a new window - just close that window when
you're through and you should be back here.
Hello
World
A
Calculator
Links to a couple of Delphi introductory
books available online.
Learn
Delphi in 21 Days
Essential
Pascal
And finally a couple of sites with
some introductory tutorials.
Delphi-Dolphin,
About
Delphi Beginners page
|
Learning Delphi
DelphiTM is based on the Pascal programming language developed in the
early 1970's by Niklaus
Wirth and named after mathematician Blaise Pascal.
Learning a programming
language is like learning a foreign language. There is a set of
words and rules about how to combine them. Whether programming or human language, the objective is to communicate
information. With a programming language, we're communicating with another
program, a compiler or interpreter, instead of another person.
This
places an extra burden on you, the programmer, because compilers aren't
as smart as people.
So, learning the vocabulary (words) and syntax (rules) are big hurdles to overcome when
starting out. One of the
advantages of learning by playing with sample code, especially Pascal or Basic,
is that the syntax and vocabulary are close enough to English language to make
it readable without a lot of preliminary study. When you see the following
code:
N := 0 ;
For i := 1 to 10 Do N :=
N + i;
you could probably figure out that it's adding up the integers from 1 to 10
even if you've never seen a line of Pascal code. Notice, by the way,
that Delphi uses := for an assignment, it uses just plain =
for testing equality. Another instance of the compiler not
being smart enough to distinguish. Also the most common error you'll
make when you start programming in Delphi!
Delphi has a visual development environment - this means that you
design the user interface by clicking and dragging components
(buttons, labels, lists, menus, memos, etc.).
Being able to understand the code in a program is not the
same as being able to write it. But by starting with a program that will compile successfully, and maybe even produce correct
results, you can make small changes and almost always learn something.
And that's what this site is about.
|
