[doozy]

For the better or the worse, Delphi has become the defacto standard Pascal implementation. Free Pascal aims to be compatible with it and Lazarus is pretty much a clone of Delphi 7. If memory serves right, neither Cantu's Essential Pascal book, which is a brief introduction to the language, nor his comprehensive Object Pascal Handbook cover the VCL but focus on the language itself.

You may want to ask these questions in the Free Pascal community, this stuff is too uncool for the HN crowd.

[jetti]

Thanks for your help. I'll take a look at Cantu's book.