www.marcocantu.com Marco's Delphi Books Essential Pascal Web Site

The cover of the 4th edition of Essential Pascal, the first available in print

Marco Cantù's Essential Pascal

April 2008: Essential Pascal now in Print

My online book Essential Pascal is available in its 4th edition, the first also on paper. The first printed edition of Essential Pascal is available on Lulu.com for only Eur 16.50 (apparently only about 21 US dollars for Lulu!) At the same link (www.lulu.com/content/2398448), you can also buy the electronic version (a PDF) for a mere Eur 6.50 (about 8 US dollars).

The book has 140 pages and is focused on the core Pascal language (and not its OOP extensions) as found in Delphi, with some references to differences or similarities in Delphi for .Net, in Chrome, and in Free Pascal. From the page "Essential Pascal is an introduction to the basic features of the Pascal language, as found in Delphi and other modern development tools, from the best selling author of Mastering Delphi."

Compared to past online edition I've reworked all of the examples to be console-based, so they can be focused on core features and be (potentially) cross-platform. The book has had extensive editing and dozen of relevant corrections and improvements. I've kept the price very low on purpose, as the book is already used in Universities around the world, and some of its users might want to buy the printed edition.

Although the book is focused on new users of the Pascal language, it is not only an introductory book. By covering dynamic arrays, pointers, functions overloading, open array parameters, and variants (to name a few rather advanced topics) the book delves into many areas that not all Delphi developers are fluent with. A twin book introducing OOP and VCL foundations (Essential Delphi) might be turned into a printed volume depending on the success of Essential Pascal.

I intend to update the free HTML version of the book (I'll add quite some advertising to it, though... let me know if you are interested in promoting your tools in it) and will also published the source code.

Overall, anyway, the book will be available as advertise-based one-page-per-section HTML (free), PDF file (paid), and printed version (paid). After that I'll retire the previous edition...

Source Code

The source code of the latest edition is available on: http://www.marcocantu.com/epascal/epascal4code.zip. It is a mere 40 KB.

What is Essential Pascal?

"Essential Pascal" is a free online introduction to the Pascal programming language. This book has been written by Marco Cantù and covers the language form the perspective of Borland's Delphi development environment. You can find more information about this book in its introduction. The book is free, but writing takes a lot of time. I'm very happy to see my efforts payed back by 5 Euros out of your pockets, it's a way to puch me to keep the book up to date over time.

What's New and Coming Along

August 2004: I've placed the PDF file within a ZIP to reduce occasional and repeated downloads. Please save the file to your disk, otherwise all of my bandwith is wasted for a couple of PDF files... Hope this is not a hassle.

March 14, 2003: Versions 2.01 of Essential Pascal is available for download as a single PDF file!. Follow link below.

March 14, 2003: As I'm devoting quite some time to this and other ebooks, I decided to ask for a payment from the readers who can afford it. So it is not compulsory, but you should feel obliged to donate if you are a computer professional living in a wealthy country and earning money out of the use of the information in the book (last sentence was added to make you feel a little guilty). Follow the payments link for more information.

March 28, 2002: An Indonesian translation has been started. An udapte of the Japanese version is under way.

January 3, 2002:
I've added the Chinese version.

December 28, 2000:
I've updated the structure of the Essential Pascal web site, adding this front page.

December 28, 2000:
You can now download a single zip file with the entire book, for various languages. See instructions below.

January 2001:
I plan adding a short chapter on file management. If you have other suggestions let me know...

Getting Essential Pascal (version 2)

The English edition of Essential Pascal version 2 (release 2.01) is available for downlaod from this site: as a PDf within a Zip file, EssentialPascal.zip (470 KB). For older editions or other languages see below.

Getting Essential Pascal (version 1)

There are different ways of getting the latest version of Essential Pascal. You can:

• See the version available on Delphi 5 Companion CD (which is still quite up-to-date)
• Browse the book online, here (see below for the online version in other languages)
• Download the file epascal_v1.zip (241 KB) with the complete text and figures (see below for the download version in other languages)

In any case, remember also to download the zip file with the complete source code of the examples discussed in the book.

Other Languages

Thanks to many people who volunteered their time for this task, the book has been translated into many languages. Here are the currently available versions (or works-in-progress) and contact information for translators. Check the translations page if you are willing to help.

Language	Person in charge	Host Web Site	Download
Dutch	Matthijs Willemstein	N/A	N/A
Chinese	Dai QinFen	Essential Pascal (Hosted on mc.com/epascal)	epascal_v1_chi.zip
French	Iannis Papageorgiadis	L'essentiel sur Pascal (Hosted on mc.com/epascal)	epascal_v1_fra.zip
German	Immo Wache (Web site) and Rafael Barranco-Droege	Einsteigerkurs Pascal für Delphi (Hosted on mc.com/EPascal)	epascal_v1_ger.zip
Italian	Paolo Rossi	Essential Pascal, Edizione Italiana (Hosted on marcocantu.it/epascal)
Japanese	M. Miyamoto	Essential Pascal, Japanese edition (Hosted on www.users.gr.jp/delphi/). A revised version is starting to appear on http://www2.odn.ne.jp/~aar72690/	N/A
Portuguese	Odilon Nelson	Pascal Essencial (Hosted on www.geocities.com/odilon_nelson/)	N/A
Spanish	Rafael Barranco-Droege	Pascal Esencial para Delphi (Hosted on mc.com/epascal)	epascal_v1_spa.zip
Turkish	Mustafa Kasap	Temel Pascal (Hosted on geocities.com/m_kasap) (Notice: The site was recently moved)	N/A
Arabic	Khaled Shagrouni	Essential Pascal, Arabic Edition (Hosted on mc.com/epascal)	epascal_v1_ara.zip
Indonesian	Hianoto Santoso	http://hianoto.net/projects/epascal/

Work In Progress..

Greek	Zafiris Keramidas	...	...
Swedish	Peter Thornqvist	...	...
Korean	Kwon	...	...

More References

For an introduction to the use of the Delphi development environment, see Essential Delphi, also by Marco. This book is still a work in progress (with a long way to go to be finished).

For an in-depth coverage of the Object-Oriented elements of Object Pascal and a complete and in-depth coverage of the development of Delphi applications (including the features of the latest version of Delphi), see my the most recent edition of the printed book Mastering Delphi.