If I pick up a delphi book, by say, Marco Cantu, will this help me with the non graphical portions of free pascal?

I guess my driving question here is, should I bother reading up on Delphi, or will it confuse me since they may have diverged far enough away. I know there's Delphi mode in FPC, but I'd like to learn just one, and there's more documentation on Delphi.

Posted in: s/pascal

🍀 gritty

Apr 27 · 12 days ago

5 Comments ↓

🚂 MrSVCD · Apr 27 at 19:40:

My two cents says that you should read the wiki and look at the tutorials there.

— https://wiki.freepascal.org/

My biggest problem is to start.

And if the delphi book is cheap, I think it is a good idea to buy it.

🍀 gritty [OP] · Apr 27 at 21:51:

@MrSVCD yeah I've been relying on that site pretty heavily but I'm old and I like physical books. The ebook is free if you want to give away your info in a sign up form, and the physical book isn't ridiculously priced but not super cheap. just didn't want to waste my money.

and yeah, getting that motivation can be hard. but I prefer it now over Python. Not saying it's easier, I just like it.

☕️ Morgan · Apr 28 at 08:10:

I was quite into Delphi twenty-five years ago ... built some fun things with it. I also did paid work in Delphi for part of a few years.

I'd say things have moved on since then, though. Java has its downsides but it was a huge step forward overall, and things did not stop there.

An example of something modern in this space is https://flutterflow.io

Yes, that's me advocating for Dart again, I am at least consistent ;)

🐙 norayr [mod] · Apr 30 at 02:37:

gritty, i would say try this:

— modern object pascal introduction

and here

— you have fpc's user, programmer guide, and many examples in rtl documentation, i think that's enough to start.

the language versions in delphi and fpc aren't that different. almost everything you can find about delphi will relate to fpc as well.

libraries may sometimes differ, compiler features differ, but the languages are the same basically.

🍀 gritty [OP] · Apr 30 at 11:15:

@norayr just what I was looking for, ty