selecting a book for lazarus

[3rdshiftcoder]

hi-

i have learn pascal by sam a. abolrous but it doesnt cover OOP. i read that lazarus is using free pascal and delphi.  free pascal uses TP 7 and some delphi.  so my thought process is to get an older delphi book kind of close to TP 7.  it seems the newer delphi books teach less of pascal the language and go crazy with the features as delphi has certainly expanded over the years.  
it also seems that object oriented books for TP 7 are far and few between. So learning the object oriented part might be easier with a delphi book.

i have read marco cantu's books.  

do you think a mastering delphi 1 or 2 book would be good to have as a reference?  

I never really put forth the effort in Pascal because borland announced no plans for future versions of the personal edition.  When i used the older delphi i didnt have any formal training.  I'd like to try and get better at pascal and make a nice application for my hobby.

thanks for any input,
jim

[matthijs]

I'm afraid you won't find a book which combines a Delphi tutorial with a OO tutorial. So find a good book on OO and then a MD2 or MD3 book will help you implementing this is Lazarus.

(MD = Mastering Delphi)

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tip.  I grabbed a copy before they are all gone.  Looking at the documentation, IDE screenshots and overall site design for Lazarus I doubt you will be able to find an old delphi book anywhere in a year or two (at least at a lower price).

[Lightning]

Hmm Mastering Delphi 6 was a verry good book for a beginer when i started with Delphi, there are some pdf versions on the web but i'm not sure they are legal ...
Borland just released Delphi2005 Personal in some Australian magazine, check the news on PGD http://www.pgd.netstarweb.com/

[Anonymous]

Lightning,

this is good news for the delphi community.  i am probably not going to use borland delphi in my hobby.  I just felt that if i was going to pour time and effort into learning something i didnt want a cloud of uncertainty hanging over my head (delphi personal).  So i left.  I am no great loss to Borland sales anyways.  

Since I left Borland Delphi months ago I discovered Java + Eclipse.  JDBC is great for DB work and SWT is kind of nice too.  I also read a little about JSP and servlets and they look cool.  I am planning on buying Star Office from www.sun.com because i am so pleased with Java.

I'd like to try Lazarus also when my new book(s) arrive.  An easy to use way to construct and deploy a pascal GUI without the DB being crippled sounds cool to me    

thanks for the update,
jim -> http://www.3rdshiftcoder.com