Horn has divided this book into 15 chapters and some 10 appendices and pseudo-appendices. The book has a floppy disk to reinforce learning, testing and debugging techniques, and time-out sections. Each chapter contains descriptive material on a topic, review questions, and programming examples.

The first chapter introduces hardware, software, operating systems, and data processing concepts. It describes the program development process, procedures, algorithms, and the use of Turbo Pascal. In chapter 2, the first concepts of Pascal are defined with variables, constants, program structure, assignment statements, and simple input/output statements. The third chapter describes functions and type definitions, namely real, integer, character, string, and Boolean types; formatted input/output; files; and structured diagrams.

Chapter 4 is devoted to program control structures for selection using blocks, if, and case for calculation and validation. In chapter 5, procedures, arguments, and values are introduced with dataflow diagrams and scoping of declarations. The sixth chapter emphasizes iteration using while, repeat, and for combinations.

Chapter 7 describes data declarations, ranging from  simple  definitions through string, structure, and pointer types and sets with functions such as ord, pred, succ, and set operations. Chapter 8 covers strings and their operations of concatenation; indexing; and functions such as copy, pos, delete, insert, str, and value. It defines random numbers, user-defined functions, and recursion.

Chapter 9 is devoted to array declarations and nested loops for number, statistical, and string and character processing. Chapter 10 develops record and file declarations and with statements; arrays of records of text and binary files; operations for sequential and direct access files; error handling; variant parts; and units.

Chapter 11 emphasizes searching and sorting concepts and the analysis of algorithms. Chapter 12 presents pointers and basic operations involving them, dynamic storage, linked lists and their processes, stacks, and binary trees.

Chapter 13 introduces graphics and Borland Turbo Pascal procedures that support different text modes, color and fill styles, lines, ellipses, graphs, bar charts, and pie charts.

Chapter 14 describes the units supporting library functions such as system, DOS, overlays, CRTs and printers, graphs, and previous extensions of Pascal. It uses the concepts of heads, interface sets, implementation parts, initiated parts, and qualified identifiers.

Chapter 15 emphasizes the concepts of object-oriented programming in terms of objects, inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, virtual methods, and hiding information.

Appendices A, B, and C cover the Pascal definition, while Appendix D deals with ASCII codes. Appendices E, F, and G describe Pascal 5 and 5.5, miscellaneous Pascal features, and debugging. Appendix H presents system-related exercises. The penultimate section covers time-out answers, and the last part is a glossary and index.