If you do not have one of his books on your shelf, then it's probably because you have two or more of them. Over the years, Marco Cantu's Mastering Delphi series has consistently added to the software literature, providing developers with information and insight into each new release of Delphi.
A talented developer in his own right, Marco is also an internationally respected Delphi trainer and conference speaker.
Marco's latest work, Mastering Delphi 7 (2003, Sybex) is now available, and like its predecessors, continues the tradition of covering many of the fundamentals, as well as providing insight into Delphi's newest technology. Among the many new topics covered in this book are the Delphi for .NET preview compiler, creating reports using RAVE, IntraWeb, and UML diagrams using Model Maker, to name only a few.
A talented developer in his own right, Marco is also an internationally respected Delphi trainer and conference speaker. He was the recipient of the 1999 Spirit of Delphi Award, and his Mastering Delphi 6 (2001, Sybex) won the Delphi Informant Magazine 2002 Readers Choice Award for best Delphi book.
Marco lives in Piacenza, Italy with his wife and daughter. His company is Wintech Italia Srl.
I recently caught up with Marco to ask him a few questions about his work, his writing, and his new book.
Cary: Congratulations on your latest book, Mastering Delphi 7. As is the case with your previous Delphi books, you've managed to add a lot of new material to the book, making it much more than a revision. Of the new material, what did you find the most challenging to cover? What was the most fun?
Marco: Adding new material to the book and rewriting some of the existing text is often even more difficult than writing new material from scratch. In any case, I found it quite difficult to cover the RAVE engine, as I've never written any advanced report code with Delphi myself, so this is an area I don't have a lot of experience with. It was a lot of fun to learn IntraWeb and some of the other web-related technologies.
Cary: In addition to writing, you teach, consult, speak at conferences around the world, and more. Which of these activities do you enjoy the most and why?
Marco: Writing and teaching are two sides of the same activity, and I don't think I could do one of them proficiently without the other. Giving classes and getting challenging questions helps me clarify my thoughts, and writing gives me time to cover technology in depth, so I have enough information to set up a good class. As for speaking at conferences, this is the activity I do that requires the most time-consuming preparation and usually gets back very little in economic terms, but I really do enjoy it, and would be ready to travel a lot again for it. In any case, I've spent a considerable amount of time of my last couple of years developing applications: I've created a sophisticated infrastructure to manage business-oriented XML documents, all in Delphi (and Kylix) of course.
Cary: Italian is your native language, but you write in English, and very well I might add. Was it difficult to write in English? Were there any particularly interesting issues that you had to deal with during your first books, language wise?
Marco: It is still difficult. There is a lot of jargon I can hardly understand and there are sentences and terms that are terribly similar between Italian and English but do mean different things, and I always get confused (at times I do get confused in Italian, as well). The real problem is that living in Italy I get very little exposure to the English language outside of the technical realm (we get little US TV and all movies are dubbed), so I have to resort to reading novels and other books in English.
Cary: Mastering Delphi 7 is almost 1000 pages long, which is similar in length to your other Delphi books. How long does it take you to write a book like this? What is your writing day like?
Marco: It takes always much more time than you'd expect, of course. This time around it took me seven months to have the book done. During that time I did some training and some development, but writing was my priority and got about half of my time. I don't have a fixed daily schedule, but I have to say that often during the day I cannot find a long and consecutive amount of time to devote to studying something new, I mean without getting interrupted by someone working with me, phone calls, or anything else. So the time for concentrating on something comes when my daughter gets in bed at 10 pm. At that point I can have a few hours all for writing, and that's what I ended up doing too often for Mastering Delphi 7.
Cary: What do you like best about writing? What do you like least about it?
Marco: I enjoy finding a nice example to make my point, even more than finding the right words to express a concept. Well, I do enjoy getting feedback from readers all over the world and having "fans" looking for an autographed copy of a book or just taking a picture with me to show to their friends. I can still hardly believe this happens, but for people who learned to love Delphi through your books you'll remain a special person, even if they've never met you.
I like to browse translated books of which I don't even understand the alphabet, like the Cyrillic or Greek texts or those from the Far East
What I don't like much about writing is having to deal with the publishing business. Not that I have particular complains with my publisher, but I always have to make more compromises than I'd wish doing regarding page count, actual content, spin-off of separate books, updates, and other topics like that.
Cary: Your books have been translated into many different languages. Which translation is your favorite? Do you have any interesting stories about one or more of these translations?
Marco: I like to browse translated books of which I don't even understand the alphabet, like the Cyrillic or Greek texts or those from the Far East (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). I have to say I like the Portuguese edition in particular, because Brazilian developers provide me a lot of friendly emails (mostly written in Portuguese, of course).
With all these translations I end up learning geography. For example some time ago a reader sent me an email from Uzbekistan: he had read the Turkish edition of the book, not the Russian one as I would have expected.
Cary: What words of advise do you have for the aspiring author?
Marco: The most serious advise would probably be to stay out of this "business", which is hardly rewarding, economically. But at the same time I do enjoy reading and writing books (I don't think one could be true without the other) so much that I can only suggest to keep focused: try to avoid covering everything you know and cover only what you know very well. Start writing articles and covering specific topics, as a way to get used to writing. A specific suggestion about this process: don't think that going from 5 pages to 50 pages is a ten-fold effort. It takes much more. And when you get to 500 pages everything can get really messed up.
Cary: Thank you for taking the time to share with us. And once again, congratulations on your new book. The entire Delphi community benefits greatly from your work.
Marco: Thank you for giving me a chance to share my views, beyond what's written in my books. My current effort for the Delphi community is to make all of the material I've written over the years freely available on my site, as a set of e-books, keep an eye on www.marcocantu.com for those.
Mastering Delphi 7
2003, Sybex
ISBN: 0-7821-4201-X
1011 pages.
Price: (US) $59.99
This interview was originally published in the Developer Days ELetter: Information, observations, and events for the Delphi and .NET developer by Cary Jensen. Visit www.DeveloperDays.com to sign-up to receive this free, bi-monthly newsletter.