What is the easiest/most effective way to learn Delphi?

Question

I am totally new to programming and I have chosen Delphi as the programming language that I would like to learn.

I basically want to build tools that will fill and submi

Answer 1

Former Delphi Product manager Nick Hodges created 30 video demos targeted to those new to Delphi and the object-pascal language. UPDATE 2017: That link is dead, videos can now be accessed thanks to archive.org here.

The videos take the viewer through the basics of the IDE, the language, and each demo mostly builds on the previous one in order to ultimately create a not too shabby GUI text editor.

If you are new to Delphi, this is a great place to start with the language and I’d highly recommend investing the time and watching the videos. I’ve seen them all and it helped me quite a bit.

The video demos use Delphi 2006, but these demos are entirely valid on any newer (and probably the older Delphi releases) version as well. Here are the topics covered in the videos:

NOTE: If the videos are no longer accessible on the originally hosted page, you can still obtain them from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20130630143102/http://blogs.embarcadero.com/nickhodges/2006/08/15/26687

Download the ZIP file for each topic, which contains the video for that topic.

• 1 – Intro to the IDE
• 2 – Hello World
• 3 – Basic Application Development
• 4 – Language Introduction
• 5 – More Lanugage Intro
• 6 – Basic String Manipulation
• 7 – Basic Datatypes
• 8 – Sets
• 9 – Arrays
• 10 – Records
• 11 – Basic Data
• 12 – Simple Class
• 13 – Procedure and Functions
• 14 – Units
• 15 – Inheritance
• 16 – Polymorphism
• 17 – Why OOP
• 18 – Properties
• 19 – Member Visibility
• 20 – Constructors and Destructors
• 21 – TurboPad: About Box
• 22 – TurboPad: File Open
• 23 – TurboPad: File Menu
• 24 – TurboPad: Saving
• 25 – TurboPad: Edit Menu
• 26 – TurboPad: Toolbar
• 27 – TurboPad: Word Wrap and Fonts
• 28 – Live Templates
• 29 – Refactorings
• 30 – Debugger

And once you get through the videos, head over to the Delphi Basics website and bookmark it. Seriously, I still use this website about 10 times a day for reference on Delphi.

I'd also recommend reading delphi.about.com's "A Beginner's Guide to Delphi Programming", which is a nice primer to Delphi programming.

Also, IMO, for the most important (and best) resource for learning Win32 API is Mark Russinovich's Windows Operating Systems Internals Curriculum which is offered for free.

It is designed to be used by an instructor to teach students. I went through it and it is awesome. Full of examples, history, and detailed explanations. In my opinion, this is an ideal way to learn the Windows API.