The Language Designed to Teach — From Foundations to Modern Object Pascal
In 1970, Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal for one purpose: to teach people how to program well. Programming with Pascal: The Language Designed to Teach — From Foundations to Modern Object Pascal picks up that mission with modern tools, teaching programming from absolute zero using Free Pascal and the Lazarus IDE across 40 chapters and roughly 1,400 pages. It serves complete beginners who want a first language that builds good habits, experienced developers curious about Pascal or Delphi, and returning Turbo Pascal programmers rediscovering the language in its modern form — with "Coming From..." sidebars that map Pascal concepts to Python, JavaScript, C#, and Java.
The foundations part takes you from your first "Hello, World!" through variables, types, and expressions, input and output, decisions and loops, and procedures and functions — including scope, parameters, and the call stack. You'll then work through Pascal's data structures: arrays, strings, records and variant records, sets and enumerations, file I/O, pointers and dynamic memory, and dynamic structures such as linked lists. Six chapters on Object Pascal cover classes and objects, inheritance and polymorphism, interfaces and abstract classes, exception handling, and generics, and an algorithms part develops recursion, searching and sorting, trees and graphs, algorithm design strategies, and complexity analysis.
From there the book turns to building real software: GUI programming with Lazarus — forms, controls, and events, menus and dialogs, graphics, database programming, and deployment — plus systems topics including units and packages, serialization, networking, multithreading, and OS interfaces. A capstone walks a complete application from design to deployment, and closing chapters survey the living Pascal ecosystem and its future. Every code example compiles with Free Pascal 3.2 or later, and the result is real: fast, native, cross-platform applications for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Whether you're writing your first program ever or adding a productive native-development language to your toolkit, this book covers Pascal from foundations to modern Object Pascal.