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Author Topic: The esteemded Jeff Duntemann writing a free book about FreePascal and Lazarus  (Read 6884 times)

Thaddy

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Famed Pascal author and journalist for over 30 years, Jeff Duntemann is working on a free book about Lazarus and FreePascal.
http://www.copperwood.com/pub/FreePascalFromSquareOne.pdf It is not fimished yet but looks *very* promising.

All old hands already know him, all new hands should read him!

Very good news!
« Last Edit: December 13, 2017, 02:37:26 pm by Thaddy »
Specialize a type, not a var.

zoltanleo

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I will ask forgiveness for the author of the book and readers of a forum in advance. I will only express the opinion.

I haven't understood about what it is written in this book and for what age audience it is intended.

If the book about the principles of programming, then what relation it has to Lazarus?
If the book about the Pascal language, then where the description of basic types and designs of language?
If the book about the Lazarus installation and a configuration of IDE, then isn't present anything interesting, except elementary skills of installation there?

imho, from the book I haven't seen practical benefits yet.
Win10 LTSC x64/Deb 11 amd64(gtk2/qt5)/Darwin Cocoa (Monterey):
Lazarus x32/x64 2.3(trunk); FPC 3.3.1 (trunk), FireBird 3.0.10; IBX by TonyW

Sorry for my bad English, I'm using translator ;)

molly

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I will ask forgiveness for the author of the book and readers of a forum in advance. I will only express the opinion.
I will do the same  :P

Quote
I haven't understood about what it is written in this book and for what age audience it is intended.
You might want to actually read the book (instead of a quick-scan, if you did that at all), as the target audience is listed. The writer is very clear about that.

I have no idea what age has to do with anything.... old enough to be able to read letters, understand words, sentences and paragraphs ?

Quote
If the book about the principles of programming, then what relation it has to Lazarus?
Also listed in the actual contents of the book.

Quote
If the book about the Pascal language, then where the description of basic types and designs of language?
The author chooses to use another approach. For good reason as the market is thin. I can read the official definition inside FPC manuals for a description of basic types.

You clearly haven't read the book. Read it to figure out if certain topics are mentioned at all.

Quote
If the book about the Lazarus installation and a configuration of IDE, then isn't present anything interesting, except elementary skills of installation there?
Sure, the content of the book is only about installing Lazarus and configuring the IDE. Nothing to see there. Please move on.

Quote
imho, from the book I haven't seen practical benefits yet.
Perhaps not for you, but i do suspect it does for those readers that are targetted by the author.

@Thaddy:
Thanks for mentioning. You did before if i remember correctly but there has been some nice progress.

It's always a delight to read Jeff's books. I would certainly recommend reading it, especially when fitting the target audience.

Thaddy

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I will ask forgiveness for the author of the book and readers of a forum in advance. I will only express the opinion.

I haven't understood about what it is written in this book and for what age audience it is intended.

If the book about the principles of programming, then what relation it has to Lazarus?
If the book about the Pascal language, then where the description of basic types and designs of language?
If the book about the Lazarus installation and a configuration of IDE, then isn't present anything interesting, except elementary skills of installation there?

imho, from the book I haven't seen practical benefits yet.
You did not read all of it and it is not finished. Trust me it will be good.
The plain fact that Duntemann writes a book about FPC - and gives it away for free - means *a lot* for the FreePascal community. He is an authority on Pascal and programming in general and a seasoned, funny but concise, writer.
Note his fiction is also very good...
His publication list is so long he could open a book  O:-) 8-) store...

Jeff, if you are reading this: keep up the good work!
« Last Edit: December 13, 2017, 02:44:25 pm by Thaddy »
Specialize a type, not a var.

sam707

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Jeff Duntemann?
what about a navelist marc twain reborn, writing upon uranusian cars!
@thaddy, your point of view around "little fame" and great masteriZation is just a joke to me...
meaning "because someone had a name, all future next bullshits from this someone should become a bible"?? HAHAHAHA c'mon @thaddy WAKE UP
« Last Edit: December 13, 2017, 03:01:36 pm by sam707 »

Thaddy

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Well. Other readers will correct you..... <grumpy, it wednessday >:D >:D >:D> molly already did...
Specialize a type, not a var.

sam707

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Well. Other readers will correct you..... <grumpy, it wednessday >:D >:D >:D> molly already did...

noone is gona "correct" me! I did simply put old common sense precepts, nowadays forgotten =
sheeps following a "leader" running to the cliff do not impress me. So when I read a book, i don't really care the author. It can be good even if its written by Mr. Smith or Ms. Pichonatto. Even more, followers, in all domains can eventually admire unprovable craps (Picasso, Darwin, "talking" hiip hoope Djs paid for nuts, etc etc) meaning "Aomalies" can become the norm in a dark slow decadence.
So I didn't say the book you promote will be absolutely a stock of craps, I just said that is not because the author had a name, then it has better chances to be good than other bright books written by unknown authors. (thats an always false assertion under the real Light)
I'm fully awake  :P Big bad wolf in me  :D
« Last Edit: December 14, 2017, 01:13:08 am by sam707 »

dbannon

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I speak as someone who had barely heard of FPC/Lazarus about six months ago and now have a couple of thousand lines of code working. So, I'm arguing I can speak for the target audience.

Firstly I applaud anyone trying to increase the net quantity of reliable documentation available for Lazarus. Loudly ! The one single thing thats holding 'the product' back is its erratic docs. (and yes, I have contributed to the wiki but not yet brave enough to be submitting patches to svn).

I think it would be very wrong to judge such a book on the basis of the current snapshot and one isolated point in it but I can highlight the one thing I looked up and how "it just does not work".

Page 101 refers Ubuntu users to http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_release_version_for_Ubuntu for a canned script that will (implied ?) get you one of the packaged Lazarus Releases that I have found work well and are trivial to install and get working. However, the page contains no such content. Maybe it did when the author last looked. Maybe it should. But it does not.

And thats a problem.

The author apparently has decided to not cover building from source and therefore not look at the implications that to build FPC.ver.X you need FPC.ver.X - Y.  I understand that when writing a (eg) book you must set boundaries. But I do think that the very act of setting boundaries (and the need to set boundaries) actually substantially reduce the usefulness of the book. A chicken and egg argument.

But I think I'll still have a read of whats there now and I'm quite sure it will do me no harm and probably quite a lot of good. So, I thank the author and wish him the best.

Davo
Lazarus 3, Linux (and reluctantly Win10/11, OSX Monterey)
My Project - https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy-ng and my github - https://github.com/davidbannon

VTwin

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I learned Pascal using Turbo Pascal, from FORTRAN, and had copies of Jeff Duntemann's books Complete Turbo Pascal and/or Turbo Pascal Solutions, although I can't find them at the moment. I could find disagreements with the approach in this book, but he is targeting beginning programmers, with useful sections for those transitioning from other languages.

What Lazarus/FreePascal needs is advocates and enhanced documentation. There is a bias that Pascal is old and inferior, that should be corrected. Object Pascal is a clear, well typed, and powerful language, with an excellent cross-platform IDE. Nothing that I know of competes. So I greatly applaud Jeff's efforts.

Cheers,
VTwin
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Ubuntu 18.04.3: Lazarus 2.2.6 (64 bit on VBox)
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turrican

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I would like to buy this book, because is nice to have a well written book about this awesome language!

eny

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As much as the effort is appreciated , the programming style is very 80-ish and outdated. It would be good to stay far away from the crt unit and text based programs that use gotoxy.

I didn't like reading Lord Of The Rings - too much noise: I don't need to know that when Frodo is about to cross a meadow, the grass in the meadow is 15cm long, a dark shade of green fading into light green at the top, grouped in sets of 75 blades of grass, with a width of 1-3 mm and an average width of 2.3mm, with roots extending to 1/6th of the length, that it grows best in a sunny region with daily temperatures of around 22 degrees and with on average 5 days of rain during the month, that the average life span is 4 years and that it's very flexible and bendy.

Complete Turbo Pascal was, at the time, a very educational book.
It's successor was not.
All posts based on: Win10 (Win64); Lazarus 2.0.10 'stable' (x64) unless specified otherwise...

VTwin

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I didn't like reading Lord Of The Rings

I applaud Duntemann's effort, and leave criticism of his new book to others. "Lord of the Rings", however, is not an apt analogy, and is one of my favorite works of fiction. Maybe "The Silmarillion" went too far, I never finished that.

Cheers,
VTwin
“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” -Linus Torvalds

Free Pascal Compiler 3.2.2
macOS 12.1: Lazarus 2.2.6 (64 bit Cocoa M1)
Ubuntu 18.04.3: Lazarus 2.2.6 (64 bit on VBox)
Windows 7 Pro SP1: Lazarus 2.2.6 (64 bit on VBox)

 

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