http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf<\/a><\/p>\nThis link is present above, and also at the end of my WordPress page entitled, \u201cMy Currently Available Books.\u201d Click the link and download the PDF. It\u2019s a biggie, as a 354-page PDF probably has to be, at 5.7 megabytes.<\/p>\n
The big win in this release is that it has a clickable TOC for the whole book in a window to the left of the page display itself. So no matter where you are in the book, you can click a different chapter title shown in the TOC window (which lists all of them) and be there with that one click.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t create this TOC, though I realize now I\u2019d better learn more about PDF internals and how to create and change them. No, Contra reader Robert Riebisch built the TOC for me and installed it into the most recent release, which I edited a little this morning and present to you as the update for 9-13-2025.<\/p>\n
As an aside: Are there any recommendations for a solid technical book on creating and changing PDF files?<\/p>\n
For those who haven\u2019t heard about the book before: It\u2019s a distillation of (almost) all my books on Pascal, from Complete Turbo Pascal<\/em> in 1985 to Borland Pascal 7 from Square One<\/em> in 1993. (The only book I didn\u2019t draw from was Turbo Pascal Solutions<\/em>, published in 1988 and mostly about DOS-specific tricks with Turbo Pascal 3.0.)<\/p>\nI released the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. What this means is that it really and truly is a free ebook. You can pass it around, post it on your site, give it to anybody who wants it. I have suggested it to homeschooling parents and college kids and many others. It\u2019s an intro not simply to Pascal but to the ideas behind programming itself. The FreePascal compiler is free, so given that I\u2019ve long since made decent money on those books, I decided to make the book free too.<\/p>\n
The book uses the Lazarus IDE that comes with FreePascal for editing and debugging, but note well that it doesn\u2019t cover GUI programming with Lazarus<\/em>. The example programs, when run, display output as text in a console window. I have begun a book on GUI programming with Lazarus, but that requires knowledge of object-oriented programming, which I just didn\u2019t have room to cover in FreePascal from Square One<\/em>.<\/p>\nSo it\u2019s there. Go get it. Let your Pascal-writing friends know about it, and pass it along. It\u2019s free, and always will be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Note: I’ve released a new rev of the book as of 11-11-2025, and that’s what the link below will fetch for you.] I fixed a raft of typos and other minor issues in my free PDF ebook FreePascal from Square One, and I uploaded it to my WordPress instance at this URL: http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/FreePascalFromSquareOne-11-11-2025.pdf This link […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-noneoftheabove"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5480"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5527,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5480\/revisions\/5527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}