Re: Publishing (what would you pay for?)
From: marek jedlinski (marek_at_tranglos.INVALID.com)
Date: 07/31/04
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Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 23:22:20 +0200
On 30 Jul 2004 15:25:09 -0700, "Xavier Pacheco"
<xavier@_nospam_xapware.com> wrote:
>What might book publishers such as Sams, O'Reilly, etc do given these
>new challenges?
The book I've got by far the most mileage from is Steve McConnell's Code
Complete. Now a heavily updated edition is (or will soon be) in print, but
I'm not sure I want to buy it "again", even though the new edition has lots
of new content. I don't register books typically, because there's very
little value in it, but if I could somehow register and purchase the new
edition at a significantly reduced price, I'd so in an instant. This, by
the way, goes also for Delphi books whose new editions come out with every
new version of Delphi.
But I'd really like to make another suggestion. Yes, there's a good number
of Delphi books already on the market, and yes, a lot of good stuff can be
found free on the internet. But there are huge blank spots on the map, too.
I'm a hobby programmer, started about 10 years ago with Turbo Pascal, moved
to Delphi five years ago. I've never taken any IT-related courses, so there
are huge blank spots in my knowledge as well. I've done several
semi-successful freeware projects, and each time the development eventually
halted because I needed to do X, had no idea how to do X, there was no
Delphi-related information on X on the net (that I could find, but I did
look hard) and there was no information on X in any of the Delphi books
I've bought (including the ones with your name on the cover, Xavier ;) Some
of these problems just need an algorithmic solution, others I could code
myself if I only knew which side of the mushroom to start chewing on. Often
it seems the reason there's no sufficient information available on the net
is that the problems are routinely solved as part of writing proprietary
software, so solutions can't easily be published, and whoever designed them
probably expects to do it again, commercially :)
Here are some examples, please don't laugh if a professional programmer
solves them over lunch. For some of those there are open-source solutions
available in C/C++, but when I tried learning those I decided that a hobby
is supposed to be fun, so I never ventured far into C land. I raised some
of these problems here on borland newsgroups, and rarely received a useful
answer besides to buy a commercial component. In random order:
1) Delphi only supports richedit control version 2.0, and not even that in
full. JVCL does a bit more, but MS has published new versions of the
control (3, then 4) which do lots of neat stuff, such as "true"
browser-like hyperlinks, greatly improved support for tables, etc. This
stuff is not documented anywhere, including MSDN. I've seen shareware
Delphi apps use those new features of the richedit control, so there are
coders out there who know how to use them. I'm just drawing a blank.
2) Writing a text-only editor from scratch, without relying on standard
Windows controls.
3) Spellchecker/dictionary data storage. I've written rough drafts of my
own, but the problem is how to do very fast lookups on data that is stored
compressed (without first having to decompress it all). This has been done
hundreds of times, any spellchecker, dictionary, encyclopedia etc. needs
this. And for a spellchecker specifically, a word similarity algorithm that
works in languages besides other than English. I know of soundex, but it
can't possibly work for all phonetic systems.
4) PDA integration. (There are commercial solutions, but I'm not looking at
those, because everything I do in Delphi is free/open-source).
5) HTML/RTF conversion. Tried three times, gave up each time. (There are
two or three free Delphi units floating around, including one in JCL, but
they're useless if you try a non-trivially formatted document.) I wrote an
RTF parser, I wrote an HTML parser, that's easy. What's hard is mapping one
onto the other, since the two formats are very much orthogonal in
structure.
6) Write a simple edit control that never swaps text to disk (including the
swap file). Again, I know about VirtualLock, but I can't use it to "lock"
the contents of a TEdit.
7) A reusable localization engine that is fast, non-proprietary, has
user-editable language files (must use plain text files) and requires
minimum effort from the programmer (so that you don't have to think much of
localization while coding the application). I've actually solved this one,
and soon after Lars Dybdahl published his engine based on GNU gettext, but
it's still a good example of an interesting design task.
So I guess I'm looking for a high-level Delphi cookbook that doesn't
explain how to use the IDE, doesn't explain how to connect tables to data
sources, use RTTI or create custom components - this is what ALL Delphi
books do - but one that focuses on larger practical issues. Not a book to
cut and paste code from, but one that would guide me toward solutions and
doesn't gloss over the tough spots.
(Sorry for the long-windedness)
.marek
-- No ads, no nags freeware: http://www.tranglos.com (KeyNote, PhoneDeck, KookieJar, Oubliette, URLInject) "You guys got something against spam?" (Vriess, in _Alien 4_)
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