| Although there are numerous books on algorithms in the bookstores, few of them go beyond the standard Computer Science 101 course to approach algorithms from a practical perspective. The code that is shown in the book is to illustrate the algorithm in question, and generally no consideration is given to real-life, drop-in-and-use application of the technique being discussed. Even worse, from the viewpoint of the commercial programmer, many are textbooks to be used in a college or university course and hence some of the more interesting topics are left as exercises for the reader, with little or no answers.
Delphi is, I contend, unique amongst the languages and environments used in application development today. Firstly, like Visual Basic, Delphi is an environment for developing applications rapidly, for either 16-bit or 32-bit Windows, or, using Kylix, for Linux. With dexterous use of the mouse, components rain on forms like rice at a wedding. Many double-clicks later, together with a little typing of code, the components are wedded together, intricately and intimately, with event handlers, hopefully producing a halfway decent-looking application. |