Past programming history?

I trained as a geologist and learned (or tried to learn!) Fortran at University, punching our programs and data on a card punch then standing in line to feed my card stack into the card reader and coming back the next day (really!) to check my printout.
A very frustrating way to program.
A couple of years after I started work the first IBM PCs came out and the company I was with (a firm of consulting engineers) got some and I started experimenting with writing applications in Basic. I also got a hand-held computer (which I still have!) and wrote some programs I could use whilst doing fieldwork. Later I moved on to Pascal, courtesy of Borlands Turbo Pascal, and have experimented with various other languages, both 3GLs and
4GLs. Most of my programming is now in Delphi.

Were you ever a journalist?

I don't consider myself a journalist: just a scientist who happens to have ended up programming and publishing programmers' magazines!

Q: Could you please give us the history of the Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine?

A: I started with The Pascal Magazine, back in June of 1994, simply because there seemed to be very little in the way of resources for Pascal developers.
When Borland brought Delphi out it was a revolution and generated a huge interest amongst developers. The early days of Delphi 1 were a very exciting time. We started The Delphi Magazine in April 1995 and it has become a firm favourite with professional Delphi developers the world over. Developers Review launched in October 1997: again, to fill a
niche in the market which no other publisher was satisfactorily addressing, that is, to provide high quality impartial reviews of a wide range of software development tools.

Q: Who came up with the idea to start the Developers Review and The Delphi Magazine?
A: Me!

Q: How many times a year is the Developers Review available to subscribers?
A: Six.

Q: How many times a year is the The Delphi Magazine available to subscribers?
A: Twelve.

Q: Can you please give us some idea on what articles are in the Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine?

A: The Delphi Magazine is devoted to high quality technical "how to" articles on Delphi.
We aim at the serious professional developer, with a good spread of intermediate to advanced level material.
We have regular columns on algorithms, system-level issues, COM programming and
client/server development, as well as the world-famous Dr. Bob with his Under Construction column!
One of the most popular parts of the magazine is The Delphi Clinic, edited by Brian Long (a leading Delphi consultant and trainer in the UK), which contains answers to readers' queries. I often find that when I get stuck with a problem in a Delphi app, the answer is in
a past Delphi Clinic more often than not! (and almost never in a Delphi book, I should add -- why is it that book authors rarely write about the difficult things, only the easy stuff that you learn quickly?!).
Each issue is typically 68 or 76 pages. We limit the amount of advertising so that
readers get plenty of good solid articles in each issue -- we feature more editorial per month than any other Delphi publication I know of. I'd like to think it's higher quality too!

A: Developers Review contains news and authoritative reviews of software development products.
We concentrate on the Windows platform, but our Technical Editor Dave Jewell (about the most respected technical journalist in the UK) is about to begin a new column on platforms, looking at new developments in BeOS, Linux and so on. There are beginning to be some real alternatives to Windows out there! We also feature a regular column on Java
issues and products. Over the year we aim to review each major new development product release and a whole swathe of libraries, components, tools and utilities too. I'm aware of no other publication which has such a detailed review coverage of developer tools.

Q: Can the Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine be understood by a beginner or are they very technical in content?

A: The Delphi Magazine does contain some beginner-level material; I think the best way to answer this is that as your experience grows, you will be able to return to the articles that were "over your head" at the time and learn from them, as well as learning from each new issue. Our goal is that no matter how experienced you are, we'll still have something to teach you.

A: Developers Review is appropriate for all software developers.

Q: Who contributes to the Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine?

A: We tend to use professional programmers who are doing real life day-to-day work, rather than journalists who may not get to see any real-life challenges. We use the very best technical gurus we can lay our hands on! Some of our authors are very well known (Dave Jewell, "Dr. Bob" Swart, Marco Cantu, Steve Teixeira etc).

Q: Can anyone write articles for Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine?

A: Anyone can submit an article for The Delphi Magazine: just email me a synopsis or outline of your planned article.
For Developers Review, we commission each review (we don't ever take unsolicited material). But, I'm always interested to hear from potential reviewers -- you need to be very
experienced in your field.

Q: How can people contact you?
A: Email me at [email protected]

Q: Are the Developers Review and The Delphi Magazine available world wide?
A: You can subscribe direct with us, or via our local distributors. Our website at www.itecuk.com has full details.

Q: Do subscribers get a cd-rom disk of code examples with the Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine?
A: The Delphi Magazine includes a free companion disk with each issue, with all the source code from that issue. We include a bonus CD-ROM of trial software and components with at least two issues of Developers Review per year -- the next one will be with the June issue.

Q: What do you enjoy about your job the most?
A: When a reader tells me that a particular issue or article really helped him or her.

Q: Do you have a wish list for future versions of Delphi, if so what?

A: I guess my biggest wish is to make more of the mundane things more easy -- perhaps to include much more in the way of automatic code generation. I wonder if sometimes there isn't too much emphasis on the wonderful new multi-tier stuff and COM development, at the expense of making the kind of things most developers do day-in, day-out a lot easier. Why, for example, is there no built-in utility routine to do things like copy or delete a whole directory tree of files? Or search a whole slew of files for text or binary data? I use this kind of stuff a lot.

Q: Many rumours are going around about Delphi or Inprise/Borland not surviving the next few years, what do you think about these comments?

A: These rumours have been around for as long as I've known the company and it's still here! Delphi is an amazing product and although I don't think that Inprise are about to disappear, even if that did happen someone would carry on with Delphi, I'm sure.

Q: What web sites do you recommend for a new Delphi programmer?

A: There are so many, but my two top recommendations (after our own at www.itecuk.com of course!) are Dr. Bob's site at www.drbob42.com and the developers newsgroup search site run by HREF Tools at developers.href.com -- this is an excellent way to find helpful information or free/shareware on Delphi and other software development topics.

Q: Do you have any advice to new users of Delphi?

A: Subscribe to The Delphi Magazine to improve your skills, join a user group (UK users check www.richplum.co.uk) so you can talk Delphi with other users, consider going on a training course and look at other people's source code for ideas and style!

Q: What is your view on the latest changes at Borland/Inprise?

A: It's frustrating that Inprise have some great products (especially Delphi), the company seems to go through continual internal changes and soul-searching, with regular bouts of firing more "excess" staff and cost-cutting. A US-based developer remarked to me recently that he hadn't seen Delphi advertised outside of the Delphi-specific publications for what
seems like a very long time. When it's the best product the company has and provides a real alternative to competing products from the likes of Microsoft that seems real strange.

Chris Frizelle
Editor/Publisher
Developers Review & The Delphi Magazine

Email: [email protected]
Tel  : +44 181 249 0354  Fax: +44 181 249 0376
Mail : 9a London Road, BROMLEY, Kent  BR1 1BY, United Kingdom
Web  : www.itecuk.com