This book is certainly not for beginners. But if you can read and understand this book, you can become one of the elite Windows programmers.

The material starts out with the assumption that you understand Delphi, Pascal, and object oriented programming. Each chapter grows progressively more complex, and explains the inner workings of the Delphi IDE itself, as written in Delphi.

This is THE book to own for any serious Delphi developer.

Certainly not for the entry level but probably the most insightful Delphi book I have purchased. Advanced everything! The first 4 chapters are the best. Class references, casting, "Fake" casting. Excellent reference for the RTTI (an ablsolute neccessity for Components and Com). Excellent reference for messages and how Dephi handles them, and how you can handle them. Excellent reference on OOP implemented in Delphi (finding classes, components; Owning, parenting; Creating, Destroying). Many explanations on the techniques used throughout the Dephi source code. If you really want to learn Delphi inside-out, I HIGHLY recommend this book. To Marco Cantu, Thank you. I have purchased quite a few books on Delphi that wound up right in the trash can.

any developers can get more programming techniques and hints from this book. It is a book in between level of "Mastering Delphi 3" and "Hidden Path of Delphi 3". Sure you can get advantages from this book if you buy it.

If you're an armchair general who never served in the military and who believes that professors know more about war than soldiers, this is the book for you. If you love dreary writing, buy two copies. If tendentious history is your thing, buy three. This is campus arrogance with little sense of the complexity, confusion and danger of battle. But if you're just aching to believe that generals are all dummies, and that anybody with a doctorate in international relations could run our wars better than the men and women who sweat, bleed and die for our country, this is the perfect book for you. Good trees died for this.

I am not sure what to make of this book. The model is nothing new if you really think about it. It's bottled snake oil to some extent. The analysis is arbitrary (that does not mean wrong) and one can find subtle flaws. There are many interesting facts, and other ways to look at events and battles, but the book is useful only to the narrow-minded. I wonder who wrote the other reviews. His friends?

If you enjoy this type "failure" analysis (such as the book "Normal Accidents"), I think you'll find this to be an excellent read. My interest is primarily in business strategy and related issues (not in military history and strategy per se), but the authors present material which I found to be very useful across many different professions. My complements to the authors for good cases, good analysis and good writing. I really had great fun reading this book. It could have used better proof reading, but the errors enountered in no way hindered the presentation in any material way.