Rating: 
Summary: Great book for the beginner and the advanced
Review: ...I've never written a Palm program before, but did with this book by my side. From the step by step installation of the tools necessary to create Palm apps to giving the source code for a fully functioning application the authors have created not only a how-to, but an excellent reference. Definitely a must have.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Beginners' Manual
Review: A good book for all those who would like to develop for the Palm platform but don't know where to begin. There is alot of material out there (especially on Palm's site) and it can be very intimidating. This book puts everything into focus for the first time developers of Palm. This book expects a pretty good understanding of C. All in all, very easy to read and very clear code examples. It is also great in that it does not assume you are using one IDE or another, but sticks to the most relevant aspects of tackling this field, the PalmOS and its Programmers' APIs.--Ray
Rating: 
Summary: Wait for the second edition
Review: A sloppily produced book (eg figure 10 on p32 missing)most unlike oreilly The text needs a good re-edit The code needs to be shown complete The stated skip-overs need to be documented
Rating: 
Summary: Beginner's book in programming.
Review: After buying a Palm organizer, I knew I had to develop an app for it. This book is not written in such a way to help even a beginner get off the ground. Although it talks about different environments and other software to use, there is no clear thought and organization. The author does stress on good programming design and development, but thats about it. I'm sort of diappointed in this title, especially since its an O'Reilly book. Skip this one and find another Palm programming book!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent - Latest Edition will always be on my bookshelf
Review: After dabling with a Palm for awhile, and browsing the 1st ed of this book, I decided to get serious about Palm programming. So I obtained the latest edition, 2nd edition and wondered why there isn't a 3rd edition; as the second edition does not cover higher than Palm OS 4.1. However, given that, I find now that I am reading this 2nd edition from cover to cover. It is truely excellent. Yes there are areas it would be nice to cover in more detail; but there are also specific books such as Palm Database Programming that go into these areas in more depth. I have lectured at college, and am planning to give a semester course in Palm Programming, and I intend to have each of my students buy this book as the major text. I shall always buy the latest most current edition of this for my bookshelf. Excellent work and praise for the two authors! Where is the awaited 3rd edition?
Rating:
Summary: Pleasantly Surprised
Review: After reading the other reviews here I was a bit hesitant at purchasing this book. I just needed a little bit of a helping hand in several areas. This book gave me exactly what I was looking for. It made many of the basic functions easier to understand. In the introduction the book states that it was not written from start to finish, and was not really designed to be red that way, but if you want to you can. I did not need to read cover to cover, I just jumped to the bits that I needed help with. If you are not a C programmer or are an experienced palm programmer this book is not for you. If you know C (even just the basics of it) or C++ and you do not know palm, or only know limited palm, then this book could be a big help. I know it was for me. I would sum it up as "A good learning reference". Not a learning guide to itself but that is what the palm documentation is for anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Top book for Learning Palm OS Programming.
Review: After using a number of books (from the library) and resources (including the Palm Site) I have found that this is by far the most comprehensive yet concise resource for learning to program the palm, with a nice balance between a tutorial and a reference book. Be warned you should already know C or C++ before atempting to learn Palm OS Programming, life would be just too hard to deal with if you have to learn both together, and this book will not help you learn C/C++.
The best feature is that they deal with CodeWarrior and the FREE PRC-Tools (GCC based) equally, as many books don't consider the hobbiest/shareware developers that do not want to invest in the expensive development environments.
Good investment, that will save a lot of time it would take to get this information from other sources such as the Palm OS Site.
Rating:
Summary: Horrendous
Review: An Absolutly horrendously terrible book. Ignore this with a 10 foot pole. This book should be titled 'half a book on nothing, half a book on conduit development'. Information in here is sparse. Nothing is covered in any great detail and things are overlooked. This book seems to ramble from one thing to another, lacking any strong cohesiveness that is required. In hindsight, Glenn Bachmans Palm book from sams, as well as the dummies guide, leave this book far far behind. Stick with the Dummies Guide or Palm Programming (Sams Professional). The only people who recommend this book is 3Com/Palm Computing, nobody else. Its an O'Reilly book, but dont mistake that for equating with quality.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for PalmOS conduit development
Review: Developing a conduit can be as daunting as writing the client application itself. The PalmOS conduit documentation is excellent as a reference and it includes many samples and even a VC++ wizard (if you're a C++ fan), but no hand holding tutorials to walk you through the maze. Neil and Julie's book dedicates 100 pages to the topic (in C nonetheless), starting with a simple installer, then a simple hello world conduit, progressing through one way synchronization, and finally fast and slow two-way synchronization. The pacing, detail, and explanation of the code samples for developing this conduit are perfect, and I was able to start at the beginning and develop my own full-featured conduit in parallel to their example quickly and easily. I'd looked through a half dozen other PalmOS programming books and found almost nothing on conduits. For all other PalmOS development, I can't really comment except to say if the rest of the book is as good as the conduit section, then this should be the only PalmOS book you'll ever need.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent for PalmOS conduit development
Review: Developing a conduit can be as daunting as writing the client application itself. The PalmOS conduit documentation is excellent as a reference and it includes many samples and even a VC++ wizard (if you're a C++ fan), but no hand holding tutorials to walk you through the maze. Neil and Julie's book dedicates 100 pages to the topic (in C nonetheless), starting with a simple installer, then a simple hello world conduit, progressing through one way synchronization, and finally fast and slow two-way synchronization. The pacing, detail, and explanation of the code samples for developing this conduit are perfect, and I was able to start at the beginning and develop my own full-featured conduit in parallel to their example quickly and easily. I'd looked through a half dozen other PalmOS programming books and found almost nothing on conduits. For all other PalmOS development, I can't really comment except to say if the rest of the book is as good as the conduit section, then this should be the only PalmOS book you'll ever need.
| 
