The Tomes of Delphi Algorithms and Data Structures by Julian Bucknall has been revised and is currently selling on lulu.com. Bucknall is the chief technology officer at Devexpress which writes software for Delphi and Microsoft Visual Studio. It does seem that Devexpress is heavily moving towards the Visual Studio product line and will not put too much into the Delphi VCL product line. Their products are very well written but the cost to the development is extremely high where you can begin to spend about $900 for the low end or as high as $2200 for the yearly subscription.
Their competition in the Delphi world is TMS Software and that is something Bucknall does not want to speak about since TMS is about 2/3 lower in cost and the components are well written.
Bucknall wrote the original book back in 2001 and decided to have it republished for the current date. Now that being said I found the book to still have the original content from 2001 (speaking about accessing the CD which is not even part of this revision) so in basic terms, I could have found a copy from 2001 and use that instead of purchasing the newly bounded book.
The books does provide an overview of using algorithms and data structures as well as a discussion of algorithm performance, and provides simple coverage of topics such as arrays, linked lists, and binary trees. The book also provides search algorithms (sequential and binary searches) as well as including bubble, insertion, Shell, quicksort, merge sort, and heap-sort. There is a limited view of hashing, hash tables, priority queues, state machines and regular expressions which wraps up with data compression techniques.
It provides source code but using very early Delphi versions, you wonder if Bucknall was looking to cash in by doing a simple reprint without doing any sort of work as well as selling this as if it was updated to a Delphi version that at least is in this decade or did he sell the rights to the book for someone to do this sort of deceitful publishing.
Bucknall tends to come off with such a heavy head you wonder whether if can walk down the street informing folks that this book was sold for a huge amount of money when in fact I would feel sorry for a fool and their money.
My recommendation is to get the PDF at the low cost because you will not be using it very often.
Product Details
Publisher: Julian Bucknall
Published: September 25, 2006
Language: English
Pages: 524
Binding: Perfect-bound Paperback
Interior Ink: Black & white
Weight: 2.28 lbs.
Dimensions (inches): 7.44 wide x 9.68 tall
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