Wednesday 4 March 2020

How to Attach Notes to TreeView Branches in Delphi

Here's my latest video on programming a collapsible outliner using Delphi. In this one, I associate text notes with the branches (nodes) of a TreeView.


To watch this series of videos from the start, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHx5heVfgEtHeS6O2ePOkr3f-agvPxi6

Sunday 1 March 2020

Delphi is 25! And Now I Have a Book…

I’ve been programming in Delphi for over 25 years. What? Can that really be true? It doesn’t seem that long but Delphi’s just had its 25th birthday so it really must be. It was launched in 1995 and I was using the pre-release beta some months before that. I wrote the review of Delphi for PC Plus Magazine and for more than ten years after that I wrote the monthly Delphi programming columns for the same magazine.
Delphi was the successor to Borland’s hugely successful DOS-based Turbo Pascal and its less successful Windows Pascal (even I can hardly remember that – I think it was called ‘Borland Pascal With Objects’ or something equally unmemorable). At the time, Delphi was, in my view, far the best visual (drag-and-drop, design-and-code) environment for Windows. Its only real competition was Microsoft’s Visual Basic. The trouble is that no matter how visual you make Basic, it’s still Basic. Whereas Delphi used a very nice version of Pascal that had a reasonably modular unit-based system, good Object Orientation and also had low-level features for anyone who might be missing C.

This is the latest in a series of little programming books. Other titles include:

  • The Little Book Of C
  • The Little Book Of C#
  • The Little Book Of Ruby
  • The Little Book Of Pointers
  • The Little Book Of Recursion
  • The Little Book Of Adventure Game Programming

Anyway, Delphi is still going strong. It’s owned by Embarcadero these days and you can get a free copy from their web site. To celebrate Delphi’s 25th birthday, I’ve just released a book for new or intermediate Delphi programmers. It’s called The Little Book Of Delphi and it’s available in paperback or as a Kindle eBook from Amazon.

The Little Book Of Delphi covers:

  • Fundamentals of Delphi
  • The Object Pascal language 
  • Object Orientation
  • Variables, Types, Constants
  • Operators and Tests
  • for loops and while loops
  • Procedures and Functions 
  • Parameters and Arguments
  • Arrays and Lists
  • String Operations
  • Case Statements
  • User-defined Types
  • Constructors and Methods
  • Creating and Freeing Objects
  • Inheritance and Encapsulation
  • Virtual and Overridden Methods
  • File-handling
  • Text files and Binary files
  • Streaming and Serialization
  • Errors and Exceptions
  • ...and much more

Here are the links:
Amazon (US)
Paperback: https://amzn.to/37ZJqHF
eBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0854D12GJ

Amazon (UK)
Paperback: https://amzn.to/392AJxm
eBook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0854D12GJ

Monday 24 February 2020

Ruby Instances and Instance Variables

What the heck is an 'instance' and why does it have its own variables? My latest YouTube video for Ruby programmers explains all...

Monday 17 February 2020

Program a Collapsible Outliner in Delphi with Object Pascal

Collapsible Outliners are fantastically useful things. And they aren’t all that difficult to program. I have a short free course on YouTube that shows you how to create an outliner using the free Delphi Community Edition from Embarcadero and the Object Pascal language.

This free course shows you how to add branches and sub-branches to an outline and even how to drag and drop branches from one place (one ‘node’) to another in the outline ‘tree’. Later in the series I’ll show how to add formatted notes to branches so that you can create a brainstorming tool. This is a fun and useful project and a great way to learn to program in Delphi.

Delphi, incidentally is 25 years old this week. How time flies! I was one of the beta-testers for Delphi 1 and for over ten years I wrote the Delphi programming column for ‘PC Plus’ magazine in the UK. Object Pascal is a really nice language and Delphi is an excellent Windows-based IDE.

Incidentally, even if you aren’t interested in Delphi, bear in mind that I have lots more free programming lessons on YouTube. At the moment, I’m releasing one new video every week on topics ranging from Ruby programming to writing an adventure game in Java.

These free courses can all be found in my playlists here: https://www.youtube.com/user/BitwiseCourses/playlists

To make sure you never miss another video, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/BitwiseCourses?sub_confirmation=1