Review
It should be looked very interesting when the man which supports one from the largest Internet ready-to-use Delphi components archives, should write review for wonderful book, which is calling to use Assembler
In 19989-1993 I used Turbo Assembler and Turbo Pascal and Turbo Pascal for Windows too many and since these times I like Assembler, language, which allows put small size modules which allows to make too much and, important, must faster than standard programming libraries makes. Classic note, which can be supported by many-many programmers, which had started to make programs for IBM PC in these years: all of us took first programming lessons at excellent Turbo Professional library (later – Object Professional) by Turbo Power Software, which main part was consist from Assembler code. Due this book, in time, when source codes of Turbo Professional missed in time you can now feel all charm of Delphi built-in Assembler (BASM) and use all its power in your projects.
For what, you said? In many cases use of BASM will bring you best speed, especially in case if you are working with string functions, comparison, use non-standard input-output devices and so on. Of course, modern computers and operation systems allows you to do not take in mind speed of your applications, but, when you should process huge amount of data, operative reports, non-standard data processing and real-time data processing the speed of processing and, as consequence is the very important factor, isn’t it?
This book isn’t just another tales about “Developers Guide”, but open your mind how to use BASM, but will another time point your attention to your code, how it is clean and correct. It is very important thing, trust me…
My opinion, Guido Gybels should be more known. Maybe, this is the result of wide using ready-to-use components tendency, maybe, this is the result of my promotion J
But, Art of Programming isn’t just a name, but the words, which fellow programmer will say into the night: “How cool is the thing he did!”. I think that such phrases Guido already “heard” and will “hear” such words in the future…
Anatoly Podgoretsky pleased us with not just high quality translation another time (but translation can not be the other, because Anatoly knows this area of programming too much), but with nice theme choice. Maybe, this is just memories, who knows, but in our times “the trees were higher and the sky was more blue”, but this book is the reason to think that programming itself still “just place components at the form”, thing for what many C programmers still critics Delphi programmers.
Maxim Peresada (mperesada@torry.net)
Torry’s Delphi Pages
http://www.torry.net
