My new book on Delphi 2010 is almost ready, which means the printed book is expected in about a month, at the end of January. However, having almost finished two parts of the book, I decided to start selling the electronic version of these parts (about 100 pages each) in PDF format. If everything goes along the plan, I'll start selling "Part I" of the Delphi 2010 eHandbook next Monday.
I'll also publish a home page for the book, provide a somewhat expanded table of contents, and some the initial part of the source code, hoping this won't distract me too much from actually finish writing. Here is a snippet from the Introduction:
There isn't a specific focus on this book, as there isn't one in Delphi 2010. The release brings to completion some of the recent features, like improved support for the Win32 API (with specific focus on Windows 7, but not just on it) and the new DataSnap architecture originally introduced in Delphi 2009 (now with HTTP support and other extended features).
One of the new foundations of the product is its extended RTTI support and the inclusion of attributes in the Object Pascal language, the subject of one of the longest chapters. There was also a significant facelift in the IDE and debugger, with some easy to use features, and other more complex to understand and configure IDE extensions using the Delphi Open Tools API.
Here is the list of the chapters, with the indication of what will be in the three parts):
- A Better IDE (Part 1)
- The Debugger (Part 1)
- Extended RTTI and Attributes (Part 1)
- More and the Compiler and the RTL (Part 2)
- The VCL and Windows 7 (Part 2)
- Touch and Gestures (Part 2)
- Database Access and DataSnap (Part 3)
- REST Web Services (Part 3)
The plan is to sell individual parts in electronic formats, keeping them on sale for about two weeks only and then retiring them, and pricing them below 10 US dollars (that is, about 6 Euros). I should be able to offer discounts to those buying further PDF parts of the book, but not against the printed version. So if you get the PDF now and want the book in print, well, you'll have to repay it. Of course, if you buy in only one format, that's quite fine to me.
Needless to say this is quite a bold experiment, and I'll see how it works before doing it again (or even continuing). If I sell three copies and find it on thw web the next day, I mgiht as well scrap the following parts (I think you know what I mean). Finally, below is the draft of the cover. Any feedback from here to Monday is welcome!
