What this book covers

Chapter 1, Delphi Basics, talks about a set of general approaches that should not be ignored by any Delphi programmer. Some recipes are simple, while some are not, but all of them should be deeply understood. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to use some of the fundamental Delphi techniques related to the RTL, VCL, and OS integration.

Chapter 2, Become a Delphi Language Ninja, focuses on the Object Pascal language. A programming language is the way you talk to the machine, so you must be fluent and should know all the possibilities offered. This chapter talks about higher-order functions, practical utilization of the extended RTTI, regular expressions, and other things useful to augment the power of your code and lower the amount of time spent on debugging.

Chapter 3, Going Cross Platform with FireMonkey, is dedicated to the FireMonkey framework in general. What you will learn from this chapter can be used in many of the platforms FireMonkey supports. Moreover, you will learn about nontrivial LiveBindings utilizations.

Chapter 4, The Thousand Faces of Multithreading, is one of the most complex chapters. It talks about thread synchronization and the mechanisms used to obtain this synchronization, including TMonitor, thread-safe queues, and TEvent. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to create and communicate with background threads, leaving the main thread free to update your GUI (or communicate with the OS).

Chapter 5, Putting Delphi on the Server, focuses on how well Delphi can behave when running on a server. Some people think that Delphi is a client-only tool, but it is not true; the number of Delphi server-side systems running all over the world prove it! In this chapter, we'll show how to create powerful servers that offer services over a network. Then, in one of the recipes, we'll also implement a JavaScript client that brings the database data to the user's browser. The techniques explained in this chapter open a range of possibilities, especially in the mobile and web area.

Chapter 6, Riding the Mobile Revolution with FireMonkey, is dedicated to mobile development with Delphi and FireMonkey. If you are interested in mobile development, I think that this will be your favorite chapter! Mobiles are everywhere and this chapter will explain how to write software for your Android or iOS device, what are the best practices to use, how to save your data on your mobile device, how to retrieve and update remote data, and how to integrate with a mobile operating system.

Chapter 7, Using Specific Platform Features, shows you how to integrate your app with the underlying mobile operating systems beyond what FireMonkey offers. You will learn how to import Java and Objective-C libraries in your app and use the SDK classes from your Object Pascal code.