Once I got The Everything Machine published on KDP this past March, I went back to a project I’ve tinkered with for almost 15 years: FreePascal from Square One, a 354-page PDF providing an introduction to programming, using the FreePascal FOSS compiler and the Lazarus IDE for editing and building. I need to mention here that the book does not go into Windows programming, OOP, software components, or the Lazarus GUI builder. I have a concept for a second book for those topics, and have written some of it, and borrowed a little from my portions of The Delphi 2 Explorer. No schedule yet, but I work on it when time permits.
FreePascal from Square One really is a free ebook. It’s a distillation of the four editions of my Pascal tutorial, Complete Turbo Pascal, which first appeared in 1985 and culminated in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One in 1993. I sold a lot of those books and made plenty of money, so I’m now giving it away, in hopes of drawing more people into the Pascal universe.
The book begins at the beginning of the beginning, and explains the ideas behind programming, drawing on metaphors from daily life, before jumping into coding. I’ve turned loose increasingly polished revisions on a regular basis since 2011 or so. This one has things none of the earlier revisions had: A new chapter on simple Pascal file I/O, and a clickable table of contents.
The TOC thing made me nuts for awhile. I tried to make it work using InDesign, but InDesign (my 2005-era copy, at least) can’t do it. I know it can be done—I have a couple of technical ebook PDFs with clickable TOCs—but needed to buy a high-end PDF editing tool to make it work. The product is PDF X-Change Pro from Tracker Software. It’s not free, but if you do any amount of work with PDFs, it’s essential. The Pro-level product comes with a 1,372-page manual—in PDF format, of course. It took me most of a day plowing through that monster manual to find out how to make clickable links in PDFs, but once I located that part, adding links to the TOC took me less than an hour.
It’s not tied to TOCs. You can define a clickable rectangle anywhere in a PDF, and specify what page that clickable rectangle will send you to. I drew rectangles all around the lines in the TOC, then right-clicked each rectangle and specified a destination page number for each line.
If you want the book, it’s right here. You’re welcome to share it around, post it on your site, or give it to anyone who might be find it useful. If you’re interested in FreePascal and Lazarus, here’s where to go to download them. They’re as close as you’ll get to Delphi in the free software universe, and it’s about the only programming environment that I use these days, unless I duck back into x64 assembly. Give it a try. It’s bogglingly good.
